160: A Sneak Peek into an FBP Live Q&A with Bjork Ostrom

Today, we're sharing a recording from our most recent live Q and A, and I share some exciting news from fbphq. Hey, hey, wonderful listeners. You're listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, where we talk blogging, business and everything in between. But before we hop into today's episode, we'd like to thank our sponsors, WP Tasty. WP Tasty is our sister site where we develop smart, lightweight WordPress plugins for food bloggers. We have a recipe plugin called Tasty Recipes, an image optimization plugin called Tastypins, and a slick keyword auto linking plugin called Tasty Links. Raquel heads up our WP Tasty brand as the product manager developer over there, and she does just a fantastic job listening to the needs of our users and making solid plugins. You know, working with smart, hardworking, motivated people is one of my favorite things about being part of the Food Blogger Pro team. Which leads me to our exciting news and our tasty tip of the week. Food Blogger Pro is hiring. Yep, we're looking to add one more person to our small but mighty team. Food Blogger Pro is growing. We have this podcast that you're listening to right now. A thriving membership site with instructional videos, a community forum, deals and discounts, live Q&As, and tools for bloggers like NutriFox. And as I'm sure that you can imagine, we have a lot of members, customers and listeners to support, motivate and assist. So that's why we're looking for a Member Success Agent. This member Success Agent will respond to support requests and help our customers utilize Food Blogger Pro and nutrifox to their maximum potentials. It's someone who has a heart for helping people people, is super patient, and who is a ridiculously good communicator. So if you think you might be the perfect fit, awesome. We would love for you to apply, but if it doesn't sound like you and it sounds like someone else, you know, encourage them to apply. We are so, so excited to add another member to our team so you can learn more and apply@foodbloggerpro.com apply. And now the episode. We hold live Q&As for our members on Food Blogger Pro every single month. And we're sharing this month's Q and A with you today. They're a chance for our members to get answers to their toughest blogging questions live. Sometimes we invite one of our experts to join us to talk about a specific topic like Pinterest or gdpr, and other times it's moderated by our fearless leaders, Bjork and Lindsey in an Ask Us Anything format. This month Bjork went solo and answered our members questions about igtv, monetizing site speed, email lists, and so much more. So without any further ado, let's jump in.

This is something that we have never done before, but we've been wanting to occasionally, maybe once every couple months, let Food Blogger Pro podcast listeners know what's included with the Food Blogger Pro membership. And one of the things that we talk about on the podcast often is the video training. So we have over 300 videos for food Blogger Pro. We talk about the forums, but one of the things we don't talk about as much are these live Q&As that we do every single month. And these are one of my favorite things about Food Blogger Pro. And we thought the best way to let podcast listeners know is to record this and then publish it as a podcast. So obviously you that are attending live know that this is something that we do monthly. But for Food Blogger Pro podcast listeners, we thought it'd be helpful for you to know to get a little bit of a sneak peek into what's included with the Food Blogger Pro membership. So we have one hour for today's live Q and A and we have people tuning in from all over the world that are Food Blogger Pro members and people from Edmonton, Vancouver, which is incredible. Buffalo, New York, Madison, Wisconsin, Two people back to back from Madison, Wisconsin, which is kind of fun. Utah, one of my favorite states of all time. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Hong Kong, 1am bonus points, Seattle, Iowa City, Iowa. And we have St. Paul, Minnesota here for me tuning in. So for those that aren't familiar, these live Q&As happen every month. Food Blogger Pro Sometimes it's just me, sometimes it's me and Lindsay. Oftentimes we have an expert on so we have somebody that is an expert in a certain subject area and we ask them specific questions about everything from search engine optimization to social media like Pinterest. We have different subjects that we focus on and these are this is an opportunity for members to essentially get a little consultation that you'd normally have to pay an absorbitant amount for from an expert to answer questions. And what we do is we have a little area to ask the questions, then members can vote up those specific questions and we answer them in real time on this live Q and A. It's one of my favorite things that we do for Food Blogger Pro and I'm really excited to jump in so for those of you that are members that are tuning in live, just a reminder to drop your question in and to vote on any of the questions that you're especially interested in hearing us answer. You can vote on those and then those will go up. So we know that the we know that the questions that are people are most interested in having answered. And at any time, as you know, for members, you can go back and watch any of these previous live Q&As to see if there's anything that you can pick up and apply to your blog or your business. So with that in mind, I'm going to kick things off. You can see here I am. For those that can see the video, I am joined by Sage. She's chilling out in the background, but I'm kind of covering up when I talk. So she says hello and is excited to be a part of this today. All right, let's jump in and answer some of these questions. This is a great question about the Pinch of Yum making money in the first month. So the question is, how did you make 2197, so $21.97 your very first month? It's honestly amazing to me that right off the bat you made money and then says, I mean, this is all in a very positive, loving way. Great question and excited to answer that. And one of the things that I think is important to point out is a little bit of backstory for that. So for those that aren't familiar, this question is referring to the very first income report that we ever did for Pinch of Yam. And we talked about how we made $21.97. A couple disclaimers with that. Number one, we were just talking about the revenue. So later on, when we were doing those income reports, we started to report on revenue, but we also included expenses. And then the number that we reported on was profit. I think that's one of the really important things to consider whenever you look at a business or whenever you look at any type of numbers for a business, you need to make sure that you understand, hey, is that profit, which is the total amount of money that a business is taking home after you move expenses, or is it revenue, which is just the total amount of money that a business made? And profit is really accurate because it allows you to see, hey, is this person just spending $1,000 on ads and then making $1,000 from that? It would be $1,000 in revenue, but $0 of profit. So in those early stages, those first, I don't know how many, but There was, I would say it was 10, maybe 20 of the income reports that we did were just revenue. So it didn't factor in expenses at all. So even though it might have looked like, hey, you're making $3,000, there's also expenses that went into that and time that went into that. And so all those things are important to consider. The second thing is that wasn't our first month blogging. So we had been working on Pinch of Yam as a tiny little blog in its early stages for a long time. And it was maybe a year ish at that point, I don't remember exactly, but it was early on. It was still early on, but we had been working on it a decent amount. And. And it was after that that we started after those, that first year that we started to do the income reports. And so we had some momentum, we had some time and we had some energy behind it before we started doing those income reports. So that's another thing that's really important to consider is that there is a substantial amount of time and energy that we put into it before we started doing those income reports, which in the early stages were just revenue. So. So two important factors to consider and important things to think about whenever you think about any business or blog that's talking about, hey, we made this much in revenue or the other important consideration is like, okay, how much went into that beforehand? And even before we started Pinch of Young, there's a lot of work that I did trying to understand websites better and listening to podcasts. And so there's a lot of lead up to that stuff. And so it maybe seemed like, hey, right off the bat we had this momentum and we're able to start building this business, but there's months and months and years and years that went into it before that. So if you want to check those out, those are kind of archived posts, those income reports on Pinch of Yum, we don't do those anymore. But I think the most helpful part of those was looking at those early stages where we're starting to figure things out and getting a feel for how that worked. And slowly but starting slowly but steadily starting to build up the momentum for the blog. So great question. Hope that clears it up a little bit. This is a great question that's coming in and looks like a lot of people are interested in this as it has a bunch of votes. What are your suggestions for new bloggers who want to reach out to brands for sponsored content? And a couple comments here down below. So we have a course on Food Blogger Pro for members all about sponsored content. Alexa linked to that, so make sure to check that out. And we also did a bootcamp on sponsored content with Danielle the expert in Food Blogger Pro, the Food Blogger Pro expert on sponsored content and working with brands and all things legal. She represents Legal, which is a consultancy, and it's a team, Danielle and her partner, that are lawyers for bloggers. And it's a great fit because she has some deep expertise on both sponsor content contracts, working with brands, and then also all the legal stuff that comes along with building a blog and building a business online. So my suggestions, and I think the best way to answer this question would actually be to tell a story. So in that Sponsored Content bootcamp that we did, we talked about kind of some different strategies. And one of the strategies that I talked about was this idea of working for free, which for most people, the idea of working for free is like, oh, that is the. You never want to do that and always get paid for your work. And in general, I really agree that it makes sense to insist on getting paid what you're worth. And in the early stages, it's going to be really hard to sell somebody on the power and impact of your work if you don't have any type of portfolio that you can point them to. So in the Sponsored Content bootcamp, one of the things I talked about was, hey, one of these strategies you could take is to connect with a brand that you love, that you would love to work with and say, I'm trying to get started working with brands and doing sponsored content. I would love to, for free, do a post or work with you in some capacity, whatever that might be, do something on Instagram where I talk about and promote your product, and there wouldn't be any need for you to financially compensate, but to just have that be something where you come to them and say, I would love to do this, and then do everything you can to. To have that be an incredible, incredible piece of content and to serve that company as best as possible. And a couple things might come from that. Number one, they might @ the end say, hey, thanks, really appreciate that. And you go on your separate ways, but then you have something in your portfolio that you can say, this is a time that I did sponsor content with a brand. This is when I worked with a brand and produced a piece of content. And here's the result from it. The other thing that could potentially happen is that after you establish that relationship with somebody, after you have that contact at the company that you're working with they might come back to you and say, hey, actually this was something that was. You did a really great job with it. You delivered when you said you would. You provided some stats and some numbers that help support this as being worthwhile for us and we would love to work with you together. Or they might come back to you and say, hey, we really love the photography. Maybe we can work together in a capacity where you're shooting some photographs for us so we can have some branded images. The point is that it's really hard to quote, unquote, sell somebody, a company, a brand, a person on working with you and paying you a substantial amount in a sponsor content capacity if you don't have the history and credibility and also if you've never, if you don't have a relationship established with that person. So in order to start that relationship off right, it's better to give as much as possible than to ask from them initially. And a lot of times the question is, people are like, how can I get paid right off the bat without having any prior relationship or any prior history doing sponsored content? And the answer is, that's really hard to do. Some of you might be able to do it, but one of the ways that's a little bit easier that allows you to on ramp is. And another part with it that makes it a little bit easier is that it relieves the burden of you having to negotiate a contract with the first, you know, one, two, three times you do it. That's a really scary thing to do. And it's like you don't know your rate and it's intimidated by the numbers and, you know, big contracts. This allows you to step into it, get a feel for it, become a little bit more confident. And it's important to know this is really important. You're not, you're not wanting to do that forever. Like, you don't want to get caught in this place where you're just working with brands and not getting paid. This is like step number one from being at a standstill and you want to be at a good pace where you're jogging or maybe running and not getting winded. But in order to do that, in order to get to that place, you have to take that first step or two to get started. And my suggestion for people that are in the early stages to take that first step is to be willing to do the work, to give as much as possible to a brand, to a company, in order then to get to the place where you feel comfortable. And it makes sense to then ask and that can come relatively quickly after the fact. But be okay with your first interaction with a brand or a company being giving as opposed to asking them for something. And we had the story here with that is we had after that Sponsored Content bootcamp, somebody reached out and said, hey, I decided to give that a shot. I reached out to brand, I said I'd be willing to work with them. I worked super hard, I didn't ask for any compensation. And now they're coming back to me and saying, we would love to work with you again. So it was this very specific story of her following along with this specific piece of advice or insight, and it worked for her. And so I think it is a very, very small sample size of somebody who implemented this and had some success with it. So worth a try, especially if you have the bandwidth to do that. So great question. All right, here's a question coming in that is about Instagram tv. So igtv, what are your thoughts and feelings on igtv? Do you think IGTV should be prioritized over Instagram stories or are they two different platforms that should be utilized differently? Thanks. So I won't read through this, but for those of you that are tuning in here on the Crowdcast, you can see that Abby, who's a social media manager here at FoodBlocker Pro and for Pinterest, left her thoughts on it. And the basic idea is, you know, each platform is going to have its own voice and each platform is going to have the people that will perform better on that platform given who they are and how they create content. My thoughts with platforms in general, and this could be applied to Instagram tv, knowing that I'm not a social media expert, so this would be more of like general business and like time management. But my, my advice is for you, especially in the early stages, let's say that you have maybe you have a full time job, a family that you're prioritizing and you're doing this kind of as your side hustle. The reality is you're not going to be able to be active and do an awesome job on all the social media platforms. So I would find one that's a really good fit for you. And a good fit means something that you're excited to use and there are people in your audience that would also be on that platform. So find something that's a good fit for you and go deep on that specific platform. And for the time being, let the other platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever it might be, Pinterest, let those be platforms that support your main platform. So if you love Instagram and that's the place that feels best for you and is a really good fit, put your time, energy and focus in on Instagram and let those other platforms either lay dormant so you're not putting time and energy into them, or you bring somebody in that would be able to help with it. So maybe you have a cousin who is in college and they have three hours a week and you can hire them to help with the Pinterest account, something like that. So thinking creatively around outsourcing those other social media platforms so you can go deep on yours and really put the time and energy that you need into growing a following there. Because the issue so often is that all of these things come out Instagram stories, Instagram TV, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook. And we get spread thin because we think that the best approach is to have a following on every single platform. And what happens is we end up managing social media platforms instead of really going deep on building a blog and building our business. And the social media stuff is really important, especially in this business of online content creation. The social media stuff is super important online, but you're not going to, realistically, you're not going to be able to put the time and energy needed into all of the different platforms while still creating content for your blog and having time in life for all the other important things. So for social media, pick the thing that you want to focus in on, that you're interested in, that you want to do, and go deep on, and either let somebody else handle the other stuff or just let it go dormant. Let it be something that you say, hey, eventually I'm going to pick that up, but for the time being, I just don't have the time and energy for it. So maybe the account is there, maybe it, you know, does some type of automated publishing in a really basic way, but you're not spending a bunch of time and energy onto it. And if Instagram TV feels like a good fit for you, if it's something that you're excited about, if it's. If it's something where you feel like, hey, this is who I am and this is what I would be excited about doing, you can look into doing that, but just make sure that there are enough people there, there's enough of an audience in order to justify that. And I think with Instagram, both Instagram TV and Instagram Stories, it is such a popular, active, engaged audience and platform that that would make sense. But an example would be to contrast that you might say, hey, Twitter feels like a really good spot for me and I really love that in terms of the potential to drive traffic or to work with sponsored content on the platform, Twitter's not going to be as effective. So you need to be cognizant of that and intentional with making your decisions as it relates to social media and the platform that you're focusing on. Knowing that the formula isn't just like, hey, what feels like a good fit? It's like what feels like a good fit? Times this is the equation what feels like a good fit for me Times what is the platform that has engaged audience that either has traffic driving potential like Pinterest, or engagement potential to work with brands like a YouTube or an Instagram? So it's a great question and I think that it's something that you'll probably consistently wrestle with as you think about, hey, how much time do I have in a given day or in a given week and what are the things that I want to prioritize from a social media perspective? All right, so here is a question about the Pinterest images and the latest recommendation for sizes. And you can see in the comment area below for those of you that are watching this, that Abby jumped in and said Pinterest is Now recommending a 2 by 3 ratio for long pins. So that would be an example of the pixel size would be 600 by 900. Any pins longer than that will be cropped in the feed. So we did a great interview with the creative, not creative Director, I forget our official title from Pinterest. And we'll link to that in the show notes for those that are listening on the podcast here. And we'll also link to that in the comment area for those that are listening in the live Q and A. And that was Yuka, her name was, and it was A. And she talked a lot about some of those kind of specific questions that we had. So that would be a good one to check out. All right, we are moving along here. This is a great Q and A. Just a reminder for those of you Food Blogger Pro members that are watching live, you can vote on any of the questions that you're especially interested in talking about here today. And if we don't get to any of these, you can transition them over to the forum and we'll make sure that we hit those. But for now we'll try and get through as many of these as we can. Question is, how many serving platters, plates, dishes does Lindsay own and where do you store them all so this is a great, great question. And we at home. So here at home, where Lindsay will occasionally shoot. I'm recording this from home today. Don't have a ton of plates and dishes. We have a smaller, ish kitchen. So the ones that we do store here are downstairs in the basement. So we have an unfinished lower level of basement. So we'll go up and down and grab those. But we have a substantial amount of just general kitchenware at the studio. And one of the main reasons for that is because when Lindsay does workshops, we want to make sure that everybody has a good variety that they can pick from. So we have a. It's not a huge. But we have a pretty big storage area where we keep all of the, like, dishes, plates, towels, things like that. Not because we use all of those personally or because Lindsey does, but mostly because we want to make sure that when people come to do workshops, they have stuff that they can pick from. So substantial amount, not as much as we need. And I would say what you'll probably find is that you will. As you accumulate different pieces that you'd use for photography or for video or whatever it is that you're doing, you'll have your go to kind of the 2080 rule, where, um, 80% of your shoots will only use 20% of the things that you have. And that my encouragement to you would be to consistently think about, okay, what is this stuff that I actually need? So you don't get into this overload of, like, just having a bunch of stuff. Um, and there's something really true about analysis paralysis, where sometimes it's easier to have fewer things because then you're not having to make as many decisions. Um, and that's just kind of in life in general. But I think especially with creative decisions, it helps sometimes to have fewer as opposed to more. Great question. All right, so this is a question that says, great question as a newbie. And then it says in parentheses, sorry, we are all new once. No need to apologize. How important is website speed, photo size, Google Analytics, as opposed to just getting busy, posting recipes, building your audience. And then there's a second part and says, also a structured data test, which I'll get to that as the second part of the question. So, first question, as a newbie. How important is website speed, photo size, Google Analytics, all that stuff. So I think this is a great question, and it's worth spending a lot of time on, because one of the biggest hiccups, I think that people or hurdles that people can run into is optimizing all of the levers and tweaks and changes and making all of these micro adjustments when the thing that you are adjusting the content isn't actually there. And those pieces are really important. Website speed, photo size, Google Analytics, all of those things are really, really important. But they become more important the more traffic, engagement and momentum your site has. So I think what happens though is people can mix that up and they can say, before I get traffic, momentum and engagement, I need to get all of this stuff fixed and tweaked and changed and make sure that it's all optimized. But the most effective content creators are doing those things in tandem with emphasis on the content. So instead of saying, I'm going to make sure that my website speed is the fastest speed possible, spending two weeks optimizing that and then not doing any content during that period, that's not really going to have an impact because you're going to have a really fast site, but it's not going to matter if people aren't coming to it. So my encouragement, what I would point people to in terms of time allocation would be focus first and primarily on the content, the main core of what you're doing. And then in the margins, let's say that you get burnt out one week on doing content, or you get ahead and you have some time during the margin. In the, in between, when you have maybe an hour at the end of a day, or you get up early on a weekend and have some time, that's when you can say, okay, I'm going to add in some of these other important elements. I'm going to set up Google Analytics, I'm going to make sure that I make one change to make my website a little bit faster. Some of the more technical things, as opposed to the more artistic side of things, which is like the content creation, which sometimes it's a little bit harder to do that because the technical stuff feels so good because you have, here's what I need to do and now I make this change and now I've done it and I can check that off and that feels really good. But with content, it's like you're never done with it. And so there's, it's, it's less satisfying because you don't have that same type of like, here's the problem, here's the answer. Now I fixed it, I get to check it off. But if you figure out how to hack yourself, meaning how to establish rhythms and how to get into the norm of content creation, then you are going to be able to long term be able to find ways to be successful with building a blog because content is such an important piece of it and it might be for you that you get into it and you're like, cal, I've realized that writing blog posts just isn't something that feels like a good fit for me. And that's okay. You don't have to do something that makes you miserable. But then check in with yourself and say, what is it that I'm trying to accomplish? What is it that I'm trying to do? And then how do I find that thing that helps me get to that place? An example would be, I just got an email from somebody this week that we're maybe going to interview for the podcast. And she talked about how she leveraged her podcast into a book deal. And for many, many people, they think, I need a blog in order to leverage that into a book deal. But podcasting is a type of content, and for a lot of people, it's a better type of content than writing and publishing a blog post. And so think about what your end goal is and how you can establish those rhythms over a long period of time in order to continue to create that content, to get momentum. And this is the last piece. Then to go back to your question, focus on the content and then build around those little pieces like the optimization stuff as you are doing that. So don't just optimize and then say, now I can do content. And don't just do content without ever optimizing. It needs to go hand in hand. But the focus should be on the content side of things. And then the second question here coming in has to do with structured data. It says, also with the structured data testing tool, four warnings were there. No one had liked it yet. So there wasn't a review or a rating. There was no video, no nutrition, and then no cuisine. And then the question is, since these are not programming issues, are they that important? So the idea with these additional pieces of structured data isn't that it's necessarily going to allow your recipe to show up higher in a search result, or it's not going to mean that Google comes to your site and says, oh, you're not including this, therefore it's broken and we're not going to show your result. It's just saying these are things that we recommend and your recipe in this case doesn't include that. That's not going to keep it from ranking on a search results page. But some of those things, like a rating or a review will help people will encourage people to click on a site. So if you see, let's say if you saw a search result with no structured data at all, there's no photo, there's no rating, there's no, um, you know, nutrition information. So that didn't display calories. Like, it didn't have any of that information. And the exact same recipe, hypothetically was right next to it, that had a bunch of ratings, it had a photo, it had maybe the nutrition information, the total cook time for it. If all of those things were displayed, chances are that you would click on the one with more stuff, a photo and ratings and reviews than you would on the result without any of that. So the incentive here isn't to say like, okay, I need to do this in order to show up on search results. The incentive is I should do this in order to increase my chances that somebody will click on this result. So it's not like this error where something's broken. It's a warning saying, this isn't included and we recommend it to be included. So it's not something that you need to panic about. It's not something that you need to, you know, stop everything and make sure that you include it. But as you think about kind of making those small tweaks like we just talked about, it's one of the tweaks that you should consider is, okay, maybe now I enter the cuisine as part of my routine for creating a recipe, just so you have that established as a norm. It's a great question. All right, this is a question about email lists. So one of the best ways from Alex. What are the best ways to grow your email list? As a food blogger, I'm having a hard time coming up with opt in ideas. So email lists. Everybody talks about how important email lists are for building an audience. And it's something that you own and you can reach them directly. But how do you go about doing that? What does it look like to build an email list? So first, a little bit of context. One thing I would encourage you, or one thing that I would want to make sure that we talk about is the statistically what it looks like for an email list. So I would say I would feel comfortable telling people that an opt in rate, a normal opt in rate for an email list would maybe be something around 1%. It could go way up, depending on how aggressive you are with pop ups and, you know, like incentives and things like that. So it might go, you know, 3, 4 or 5% if it's somebody that has a really aggressive email Opt in strategy or something that aligns really well with what their audience is looking for. But I would feel comfortable saying on average just maybe about 1%. So if you have a thousand people that come to your site every every day, that would be 10 people opting in. If you have 100 people that are coming, that would be one person opting in. So just to set some expectations around what you could expect when you are doing some of the opt in stuff. And then the other thing that I would say is if you want to be really intentional with building an email list, it's important to think about not your entire site and what do people want, but to think on the micro and to think on a very specific post basis. What do people want. An example would be on Food Blogger Pro. One of the changes that we made is we used to have a generic opt in. We still do. You could go and see it and it's 10 mistakes that bloggers make and how to fix them. So it talks through kind of 10 common mistakes and what the fix for those would be. And that was the generic opt in that we had. And it worked okay. But one of the things that we did within the last year as a team is we went through and said, okay, some of our most popular posts are around video. And it makes more sense for those to have an opt in around video than it does around general blogging. So we created a little opt in for video that was for the people that were coming to those posts because it made more sense to have an opt in specifically for that piece of content than it did to have this generic blogging opt in. So you can see that by going to. We'll include this in the show notes for the podcast and for people that are listening live. You can see it in the comment area. There's this recipe videos post on Pinch of Yum and it and it outlines that. And you can see how we did that and why it was important for us to include that. And you can see how closely aligned it is. It's the seven essential tools you need to shoot your own recipe videos. And that allows you to download a little PDF where we talk about the most important tools that we have. So that would be my one piece of advice as you're thinking about opt ins for your blog is to think about how you can get something really specific to the post as opposed to a general thing that you're giving away in your blog. And then the second piece of advice would be just thinking about how aggressive do you want to be and Asking for those emails. So you could do it within at the bottom of a post that wouldn't be very aggressive. You could get a little bit more aggressive and ask somewhere in the middle of the post you could have some type of pop up or, or opt in as people leave. So sometimes you can have that where it triggers where if a mouse goes up to the top of the page, then it'll show a little hover over that says hey, before you leave, make sure to download this ebook. So just a couple thoughts right off the top of my head, but I think the most important thing would be to think specifically about a post versus thinking generally for your blog. All right, this is a great question for hiring and here's a question. Could you describe how you decided to hire your first employee? Did you start with the VA first and then go to a full time employee? What advice would you give when considering hiring support staff, VA or local help? So our progression in building a team was really slow and it started out really close. So the first person that we officially hired was somebody that we were connected with in the Philippines and she was somebody. Lindsey and I lived in the Philippines for a year and when we moved back we hired Jade was her name to help out with some things. And that was lasted maybe about a year, a year and a half, and then she was in school and had to dedicate time to that. We had also some of our first hires were a local person that we were connected with to just help out with some social media stuff. We also hired Lindsey's best friend and she was staying at home at the time and had some free time to help out with. In this case, it was specifically Pinterest. Lindsey knew it was something that was important, but she didn't want to do that. And so we just hired her kind of on a contractor basis, so paid an hourly amount. She just kept track of her time. When she could work, she did. And it was something that we knew we needed to have happen, but it wasn't something that we needed to do. So there's just a few hours a week that she worked, helping out with a few different things. And essentially it was just slowly but surely building on that. So it was hiring people that we knew or people that were close to us in a contractor position. And then it got to the point where we said, hey, you know, realistically, if we're going to be able to continue to grow and serve our audience, we can't do all of this on our own. So then the place that we looked at and What I would recommend to you is to say, hey, who are friends or friends of friends, ideally? So maybe not your first tier friends, but friends of friends that would maybe be looking for work that's flexible, where you can kind of teach them what to do. Or ideally they would have some idea how to do whatever it is that they're looking to do and hire them to help out in a flexible way where they're working from home and maybe you work together a little bit. And then when it comes time where you have something that's a little bit more of an official position, maybe you have something that's 20 hours a week where you can start to move towards having it be like a quote unquote real job. You can stay and look friends of friends, but you can also look towards. And this is where we've really tried to prioritize for hiring for Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum is look towards the audience that you have, whether on your blog or social media. And we have a team that we love and that we're super proud to be a part of and like, motivated, intelligent, kind, incredible people. Like some of the people that you interact with here on Food Blogger Pro or, and other places. For those of you that have interacted with people in WP Tasty or Pinch of Yum. And for us it was finding people that knew and understood the ecosystem that we lived in. So people that follow along on Pinch of Yum, or people that were members of Food Blogger Pro or people that had used WP Tasty plugins, these are people that knew and understood what we were doing. And so we didn't have to teach them about the company. We just had to let people know that we're connected with the company we were hiring. They had the background and expertise and insight into what we were doing. And then we were able to then say, okay, let's work together here and build this position. And in doing that, finding people who maybe weren't necessarily like, hey, I have a background in membership management or plugin development. And you know the business of plugin development, it's finding people who are like incredible people, and then saying like, okay, let's work together to do this thing that we want to do. And much like building a blog, it's stuff that you can learn and develop and come to understand together. So in the little chat area, people are saying, like Alexa? Yes, like Jasmine. So these are people that are a part of our live Q and A right now. And as you know, Foodbugger Pro members, incredible, incredible people and we're able to connect with them through the Food Blogger Pro community. So that's where we looked. And we also have, you know, incredible team members across the board with Pinch of Yum and WP Tasty. And the connections that we made with them was through the community itself. Now, some of you might be in the early stages of building your blog, so you don't have that necessarily. A couple of things I would say with that. I would say you probably more than you know, are connected with people through your blog and you can encourage people to share it with other people that might be interested in it. So Alana, who worked on the team before she moved on the Pinch of Yum team, is a video expert. It was her mom who connected her to the position. So if you do post something, let people know about it and say, hey, this is something that we're hiring for, would love to hear from you. Or if you could send this along to people you know that you think would be a good fit, that would be awesome. If you don't have that, if you're just in the early stages and you're looking to connect with people, that's where I would say friends of friends, don't be afraid to talk about it. To say, hey, this is something that we're looking for to get the word out there kind of in a grassroots way. It's going to be a little bit easier than doing kind of a generic post or going to some kind of generic hiring place where you're connecting with people who don't necessarily understand what you do at the heart and soul of, with what it is. They can maybe understand it conceptually, but not on a. On a level deep enough that's probably important to do the job well. So it's a great question and would love to continue that conversation in the forums area if you have additional questions about it. So this is a question that I love and I think it's important to share this stuff. So do you have a pic of your early, early, early. The three early websites? I keep comparing my simple self to your current stuff and I need to get some encouragement. I think it's really, really, really important to have perspective as you look and compare and contrast to what other people are doing. So in this case, if you're looking at Pinch of Yam, it's a site that's existed for eight years, which is like 30 or 40 in Internet years. It's a established website and it's been around for a while. And if you're just getting started out things might not look the same or feel the same. And there's a reason for that. It's because you're just getting started out. And the same is true for every single site or business or blog or social media account that you look at. If you go way back, you can see, okay, this person has evolved and things have changed. You can go back and look at some of the early posts on Pinch of Yam to get a feel for photography and kind of general structure and look and feel. There is also, and we'll link to this in the Show Notes as well. There's also a post that I did on, it was an income report, I think, where I talked about the evolution of Pinch of Yum through the years. And I compared and contrasted the different designs and how it looked and what it looked like when it was, you know, just Lindsey and I creating scrappy little Photoshop things to put in the sidebar. And then eventually working with a professional designer, you know, is going from a free theme to a $99 theme to a theme where we paid somebody $1,500 to design and develop the website. And kind of as we stepped through the different progressions and you can see that it's really obvious what that looks like as it changes. And it was zero percent polished when we first started. So it's important perspective piece to look at. The other thing I would say is, and this is kind of fun, you can use this service called the Wayback Machine. What that does is it takes a screenshot or it's not even a screenshot. It preserves a website in a certain state on a certain date. And you can get there by going to archive.org web which we'll link to in the Show Notes as well. But what that does is it allows you to see different versions of a website. So if you are curious, like, hey, what did this site look like five years ago, whatever it might be, you can go back and you can look at that, whether it be Food Blogger Pro or Pinch of Yam or any of the sites that curious about, you can see how those have evolved through the years using the Wayback Machine. And it's kind of encouraging. Even the biggest sites, like, you know, Google looks very different. So I would encourage you to check that out. All right, we have some time left here. I will hit a few more of these. And if we. We won't get to all of them. But if we don't get to some of these, I would love to answer them and jump in on the forums. So if you have some time to transition it over. That would be a great place to have the conversation here. This is a question coming in from ice. I started getting emails from app companies offering their services to create a shopping list and shoppable analytics for the user and recipes. Just last week I got two from Chicory and my XX solutions Mix solutions, I'm guessing is what that is. I saw that you're using Whisk in your recipes. I'm not sure if it serves the same purpose, but I wanted to pick your brain on whether or not your experience have experience with such apps. Are they worth it, they actually generate revenue, slow down the site, et cetera. So don't have any personal experience working with either the sites. But I know at least have had a couple conversations with the people from Chicory and they are great. The basic idea here for those that aren't aware is these are apps that are hooking into your recipe and then making those recipes shoppable, so allowing the user to purchase ingredients related to the recipe. AdThrive, which is the company that we use for ads, is doing an experiment with this company called Whisk. I think it's Wisk with 2Ks and that makes the recipe shoppable. So we personally don't have direct experience with it. It's just an experiment that they're doing this month to get a feel for how it works and we opted into that. So they're doing a little run with that to see what that's like. But I know that there are bloggers that have used some of these and my feedback would be to give it a try. You could test it out maybe you can see if you know, if you install it on Maybe your top 10 most popular posts to see what that's like to get a little feel for the income that would come from that. I don't think there'd be any harm in testing and as long as there's not with either of these any type of commitment that you have and you're just clear on what the like terms and the agreement is with the company before moving forward with them. So something for sure to worth something that's worth experimenting with. And I think there are two mindsets for people when it comes to creating an income from their content. One would be people that want to have it be as clean as possible and to have as few ads as possible and to really let the content be the thing. And then there are people who say, hey, if I'm doing this content for free, I want to as Much as possible, create an income from that in as many different avenues as possible. And that might mean that the actual page or post or recipe gets a little bit bogged down with ads and, you know, calls to action, like shopping the ad or, you know, opting into an email list or something like that. But if I'm going to be doing this, I need to be creating an income from it. So I'm okay having my site have more of that stuff in order to create more of an income. And there's. There's a balance with that where on either side it can probably tip over, you probably don't. In some cases, you probably don't have enough in order to justify the time and energy that goes into creating that content. And on the other side, there can be too much where it becomes detrimental to the user experience. So I would say experiment with it. I know that there's a handful of people, even Food Blogger Pro members here in the chat as we're talking about it, have chimed in and said that they've used it. It's been easy to install and get up and running and kind of set it and forget it. And then Rebecca posted to some threads in the community forum where people have talked about what that's been like, using it. So be sure to check that out. Ice so you have a little bit of a background. And then it looks like somebody chimed in in the comment area too, with some specific numbers that they're seeing for RPM for that. And I won't say that because what those numbers are, but because we'll be doing this as a podcast. But you can see that as kind of an example for what you might expect for using some of those services. Great question. And that's one of the things I love about the community, is that people are able to say, hey, I use it. Here's what the results are and here are my recommendations for it. So fun to see that, and thanks for members for jumping in on that. All right, we're going to go a little bit longer here and then I'm going to wrap up. But there's. Let's do one last call for votes. If you want to see any of these answers or any of these questions answered here on the live Q and A, go ahead for people that are tuning in live here and go ahead and vote those up, the ones that you're most interested in. And we will try to get to the most popular next three I'll shoot for. Amazing. Paleo says if I were to launch physical food products, products that could be used as ingredients in my recipes and, or would be of interest to readers, followers as treats. How would you suggest I go about advertising them on my platforms like the blog, Instagram, et cetera? The products would be sold via a separate website, not on my blog, is they would have a different brand. So I think, I think the, if it were me, what I would go about doing would be thinking first about what is. If you're going from a content perspective. So let's say that you're thinking about how can I create content that helps support and sell this product? I would, as much as possible, think about the piece of content that would be most helpful to your readers and followers. And in your case, it's Paleo. So thinking about what are the questions that people that are eating Paleo, what are the questions that they have and what are the issues that they're running into? Brainstorm a bunch of content around that and then within that, find ways to naturally mention the products that you're creating. I think the issue comes from, or there's an issue with trying to sell a product when you think first about what's the best way to sell my product and then how can I create content around that? Because that content's not going to be as sticky and it's not going to be as helpful and it's not going to get as much traction. But if you have a piece of content that gets a lot of traction, that's sticky, that gets a lot of engagement, that's going to allow more people to see it, there's going to be more eyeballs. And if you naturally talk about and integrate your product into that, it's going to allow it to be more of a natural mention. And especially if you're able to use that in a way where people are able to clearly see how that specific product is helpful. So if it's something that allows you to, to really easily create a, you know, maybe it's like a Paleo meal pack or something like that, and the content that you're creating is 10 ways to eat Paleo. When you're crunched for time and you're able to integrate that in as one of the recommendations, I think that's a, it's a great way to promote a product versus, you know, the extreme example of why my Paleo meal pack is the greatest thing ever, it's like, well, that's not going to get a lot of traction because it's not solving that problem or helping people. But if you're able to help people solve a problem. And then in that talk about the thing that you are building or selling or creating, that plays a piece in solving that problem, it's going to be really effective. The other thing that I would mention is, and I don't think people think about this enough, especially in our spaces, if you have a physical product or just a product in general, there's probably opportunity for you to do paid advertising and to be strategic about that. And at a very basic level, one of the things that you're going to want to do is remarket or retarget the people that are coming to your site with the product. We're starting to get this up and running. We've done it in different forms for the different brands that we have. We're just in the early stages of getting this up and running. For WP Tasty. So for the products and plugins that we have, we're anytime and you could test this out if you wanted to see how it works. But anytime that somebody goes to taste, right now it's tasty recipes, the sales page, but it will also be true for tasty pins and tasty links. We're working on getting those set up here, right. And we're in the middle of that process. But anytime that somebody goes to that specific sales page and doesn't purchase, when they go back to Facebook, what they'll do is, what will happen is they'll see an ad. It's actually a testimonial from somebody that has used the plugin. So it's a low hanging fruit for paid advertising where you're able to retarget the people that have come to your sales page and haven't purchased. In your case. You could also do that for anybody that comes to your website where if they go back to Facebook, you could show them information about your Paleo product because you know they visited a Paleo website, you know that they are somebody who's interested in Paleo and therefore it's going to be a, there's going to be a higher likelihood that they will be interested in buying a Paleo related product. So that would be another way, even if it's on another site, that you could strategically think about using Facebook and Facebook Pixel in order to show ads for a product that you're creating. So I don't think enough people think strategically about how they are using paid advertising for a product. Because once you figure that out, once you crack that, it's a matter of just changing that lever. So you say, okay, I know that I can make. Let's say $20 on every product I sell and if I only spend $10 on it, then I can just increase the amount of spending that we're doing for these types of ads. And you know that there's going to be this built in profit of $10 and you can buy that traffic, which is really great if you can figure that out and get to that point where you're doing that. So it's a great question. All right, a couple more here and then I am going to wrap it up. It's been really fun to do this and I hope for podcast listeners that you're able to take away some action steps here as well and get a little feel for what it's like behind the scenes with Food Blogger Pro. Again, we do this every month. We do a live Q and A oftentimes. Lindsay joins me and we talk about other things like photography and video and we have experts on oftentimes as well. So the Food Blogger Pro experts will come on a lot of times and do a live Q and A and we'll have other people as well that are a part of it. So we'll do a couple more here and then we will wrap Joel says I'm thinking about the concept of growing traffic by taking down old irrelevant posts from five plus years ago. Should these posts actually be deleted from WordPress or simply made private? If private, is Google able to see these pages or will it create crawl errors in Google Search console? Great question, Joel. So the idea here is there's a school of thought with SEO that if you are intentional with making sure that your blog or your website only has high traffic, high quality pieces of content that and in turn taking down pieces of content that aren't high quality or are thin, meaning they're short or just don't have a lot of traction that you will see Net net again by removing pieces of content. It's not something we've ever done. I've heard podcast episodes and read articles about it, so I can't speak from a place of experience in doing it, but I do know that there are people who have done it and they've had success with it. So there's a way within WordPress where you can not delete a piece of content. You can remove it from being a public post and that will in essence delete that piece of content from public view. That would be my recommendation as opposed to actually deleting that piece of content just in case down the line you're like, oh, actually I had 10,000 people coming to this post a day and I for whatever reason didn't realize it. It's always nice to have that backup of it and to not actually delete something. And if you're getting into this where you're deleting and changing and you know, updating pieces of content would really encourage you to have some type of backup either through your host or VaultPress, which is the company that is connected with WordPress.com so the other thing to consider, and it's a little bit harder with recipes, but the other thing that you could consider is if you have a piece of content that could be folded into another post, that's a really strategic move that you could do and then do a 301 redirect. So instead of deleting a piece of content, you're combining content and combining the momentum with that content. So. And I just realized I forgot to press start on this. So I will press start on this answer. For those that watch the live Q and A, you know that you can go back and re watch these. I didn't press start so you don't know when this started. Rewind five minutes. And that's when I answered this. So the strategy would be rolling up pieces of content. It works better for content sites as opposed to recipe sites. But that's another thing you could consider. All right, we will wrap up here and I and Joel, if you have any other questions about that, drop them into the forum, would be happy to chat about that and would love to continue going on as long as possible. We have a bunch of awesome questions here, but like I said before, feel free to transition those over to the forum and there's been some awesome, awesome questions. So thanks to everybody that's tuning in live here. I'll end with this one. This is kind of a fun one. Alexis says, what platform do you use to set up your boot camps that has the capability to switch from a live broadcast to a recording and then back to live? So for those of you that have attended a boot camp, we do these boot camps three to four times a year and essentially they are a time for us to do a free open to anyone course. Or we call it a boot camp. But essentially it's like a teaching time and it functions two purposes. Number one, it allows us to just have a fun time where we can connect with people that normally we wouldn't connect with. And number two, it's a little promotional period before we do an enrollment for Food Blogger Pro. So it is both like general PR awareness and then intentional marketing and in that we do, we often do pre recorded sessions that we broadcast live and then after we fold those into a Food Blogger Pro membership. So Food Blogger Pro members don't need to attend live to see it. Those are always available there. We've done an SEO bootcamp, we've done a sponsored content boot camp, we've done an Instagram bootcamp. All of these specifically for people kind of in the food blogging niche. So for Food Blogger Pro members, if you haven't seen seen those, be sure to go and check those out. There's a bootcamp area and they'll in the video courses area. So the one of the things that we do for that is I will come on kind of like I'm doing here, do a little live intro and then we'll play. The bootcamp idea being that if it's video, it's hard to do video in a live capacity where us talking about video live. So we record it and then we play it and we do that through Zoom. And what I do is I come on live. Excuse me. And then I press play and then play the Zoom screencast which is the video. And I'm getting to the end here. So I'll wrap up as I'm losing my voice a little bit. And it looks like for those that are attending live, it looks like I'm just quietly crying to myself. But it's just this cough that I have. Sorry. So in short, it's Zoom that we use for that. And then a question to wrap up. This will be the last question that came through the chat. Is Sage still sleeping? And yes, indeed she is still sleeping. So that, that's a wrap for today. Wish I could go longer. Sorry, I'm kind of. I have this cough that I'm working through so I had to mute occasionally. But really fun to connect with you guys. Really fun to be a part of this. And we're just so honored to be a part of this community and looking forward to staying connected. If you have any questions, feel free to hop over into the forum and we will answer those there. And looking forward to continuing to do this. We have some awesome live Q&As lined up here for the next few months and looking forward to continuing to grow and learn and build with you guys. So that's a wrap. Thanks so much for being a part of it. We'll catch you guys on the other side. Thanks for sticking with me here as I powered through this cough. See you guys. Thanks.

Bye. Thanks so much for tuning in this week. Friends. Bjork wasn't lying. The Q&As we have with our members are seriously the best. We love connecting with you guys in a live capacity to work through your most burning questions that you have have about your blog or business. So as we're wrapping up here today, I'd like to remind you and encourage you to apply for our Member Success Agent position. If you think you'd be a good fit for our team, you can head over to foodbloggerpro.com apply to learn more and apply and now our Reviewer of the Week. I feel like we need some kind of celebratory music in this section because we love to read your reviews of the podcast on itunes and they really help the podcast get in front of other listeners. So this week's review comes from Madison from a Joyfully mad kitchen@joyfullymad.com and it says I've been listening to Food Blogger Pro for a long time now and can honestly say that I look forward to every new episode. Bjork is such a great interviewer and I really enjoy hearing a variety of topics all surrounding the blogger world. I'm always left with something new to think about and a new action to take each week. I can honestly say that listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, as well as being a Food Blogger Pro member for a year has made a huge impact on my blog success. Thank you for all that you do. I love that Madison takes action based on what she learns from the podcast each week. Sometimes blogging is a never ending to do list, but breaking down those to do's into small wins each day each week can really make a positive impact on your business. Thanks again for tuning in this week friends. We'll be here next week with a fresh new episode for you, but until then, make it a great.

Week. Sam.