170: What's Working and What's Not with the FBP Community

Hey there. Hey there. This is Bjork Ostrom. You're listening to the Food BloggerPro podcast. We have a fun podcast today because we're gonna switch it up a little bit. We're gonna do a call in, quote unquote. I'm doing air quotes. You can't see it. Call in, where people are going to submit a little audio call. It's a little audio clip that they recorded and they're gonna be talking about two that's working well for them. And I thought that would be fun because this is going to open up some. Some potential ideas for you as podcast listeners to hear from other bloggers, something that's working well for them that they. That you can apply to your blog. And then they're going to talk about something that's not working well, that thing that's maybe kind of a little bit sticky for them or they're trying to work through or a problem that they're trying to solve, and we'll talk about both of those things. So this will work in kind of a different way. It's not going to be an interview, but I'll kind of set up each audio clip and then we will play that and they're not too long. And then once that's done, I'll jump back in and talk through the audio clip and talk a little bit about the thing that's working well, and we'll process through maybe why that's working well. And then we'll also have a conversation. And by we, it's actually just me sitting here in this chair, but I feel it feels more inclusive if I say we. And then we will have a conversation and talk a little bit about the thing that's not working well and. And talk through the specific situation, but in a global, kind of universal way that might apply to you, the podcast listener, as well. All right, Our. Our first. I'll call them calls, even though they're not technically calls. Our first call is from Katie. She has a blog called hey, Nutrition Lady. She's going to talk about something that's working well for her as well as something that's not working well. And I think the not working well piece will be kind of relatable. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. So excited to hear from Katie and to hear a little bit about what's working well and what's not working well. Let's started. Get a listen.

Hi there. My name is Katie Trant and I'm the blogger behind hey, Nutrition Lady. One thing that's worked really well for me is using my blog as a living portfolio. I'm a nutritionist by trade and a professional writer, and the blog has allowed me to launch a small nutrition consulting business and market myself as a writer and content creator for other sites and businesses as a nutrition expert. My page views have never been huge and I'm no pro blogger, but this has allowed me to make a living doing the things that I love. One thing that's not working for me so well is getting my blog out there to the people I've been blogging since 2010. But I've made a lot of mistakes along the way and to be honest, I've really only been serious about it for the last year. Up until a year ago, I didn't even know there were Facebook groups for bloggers. That's how clueless I was. This last March I did an audit with Casey Marquis and I'm working through a super daunting to do list of things to fix. So I'm hoping that things will change soon and with focusing on SEO and good social media that I'll be able to reach more people. But for now I'm just plugging along doing what I do and loving it every day. Thank you. Bye.

Hey Katie, so fun to hear your story and thanks for submitting a little audio clip for the podcast. Really fun to hear your story and what you're up to. And one of the things that I love about the little piece that you talked about what's working well is that you remind you reminding me, you're reminding our audience, you're reminding people that a blog, something that you're building online, or a social media following doesn't have to be used for this. The holy grail of traffic. That's not the only thing that we need to think about when we think about what we're building online. And so often the thing that we are building can help us can be leveraged towards another thing. It doesn't have to be the thing. And the thing would mean that it's something like Pinch of Yum. So Pinch of Yum is the thing for us. We're trying to get people to go there. We're trying to increase traffic. We have ads. But for many, many, many people, the thing that they are building online is used as kind of a portal or a step into another thing. And that example that you gave with your blog being a portfolio and allowing you to work with clients or freelance writing is a great example of how we can think strategically about building a following online and using that to do something that we love, it doesn't have to just be trying to get a bunch of traffic. We can also think about it as trying to get people who are the people that we want to serve or who are interested in the business that we're building, and using a blog or a website or a social following as a way to create, connect with those people, to prove our knowledge, to prove our value, and then transition that into some type of relationship. The relationship could be a product that you have or maybe something that you're selling on your website, but it also might be a service. And it sounds like that's the case for some of the things that you're doing. And for any podcast listeners that are interested in working for themselves or building their own thing, the services industry or the services category is a great way to, to do that, to make that happen and to do that relatively quickly. Now, the one thing that exists with that is you're in some way gonna be trading your time for dollars, which in the online world, we often hear about people talking about building something that is scalable, which is a legitimate thing to do and a really important thing to think about. But in the early stages, one of the best ways to work on what you love, to do what you love is to think of ways that you can transition that love and that passion into something that is service related. It's a great way to transition into building your own thing, to owning your own business, to building your side hustle. And for a lot of people, they like to stay in that lane. They want to be that person that is offering a service or a product or something of value to their followers and to their readers and to their fans and to the people that are connected with them online. And others use that as a transition into building that scalable thing. So they say, okay, I have now met my, my income requirements for working for myself or for my side hustle or whatever it is that you're trying to do. And now that I have control over this and I have something that's service related, the transition then is saying, okay, how do I start to slice off pieces of this pie and transition it over into that more kind of scalable thing? And it sounds like that's what talking about a little bit. When you talk about what's not working well, you've kind of figured out this, this piece of working for yourself, doing what you love. Being in this place of, hey, I really love this, I get to do this. And now you're thinking about, how can I transition this into being something where my blog or my website or my following is the thing as well. And, and we talked about. It's a little bit of an ambiguous term, the thing. What does that mean? Well, it becomes the business. The blog becomes a business, as opposed to the portal for your other business or service, which I explained a little bit earlier. Hopefully that makes sense. And a couple thoughts around that. Number one, love that you're strategically thinking about working with people and partnering up with experts. You mentioned Casey, who's a Food Blogger Pro expert. Connecting with him and having him do an audit of your site and looking at it and saying, okay, here are the ways that you can be improving. One of the things that I noticed, and this would be a takeaway for a quick little tip, a quick little takeaway for any podcast listeners is to occasionally do a branded Google search of your own name. And when I googled hey, Nutrition lady, one of the things that I found out, and this has actually happened with, it's probably happened with three to four of my close friends who have businesses. And I've always kind of followed up with them and said, hey, there's something kind of unique or interesting about this. And that is that the branded domain name didn't show up first. And what I mean by that is when I search a Pinch of Yum, you can see Pinch of Yum is the first thing that shows up when I search Pinch of Yum. Uh, when I search Food Blogger Pro, the same thing happens where foodbloggerpro.com shows up. And because these are sites that are a little bit older, they have underneath what's called, what are called site links. So things below the, the branded URL or branded domain name. And I noticed that with hey Nutrition lady, that didn't pop up. So I'm guessing, Casey, in your audit, if there was something that was an issue, there probably pointed that out. But with my friends, the people that I that are here in the Twin Cities, and then. And then a couple other people that this has happened with, what I noticed or what I found out was that their front page was actually set to no index. And what that means is that their, their blogs were set in a way where if you were to search for the homepage, that homepage was set so it. It wouldn't be indexed by Google is an issue. So if you, as a blogger and I'm talking to the podcast listeners now, do a branded search of your site and it's, let's say it's a specific name and you've been around for a few months now, so it should be showing up in search results and you notice that the homepage isn't showing up. There might be an issue with how you have things set up on your site and you should look into that and make sure that there isn't something with your site where it's set to no index, because that means that either your whole site sometimes or your homepage oftentimes is set where Google doesn't crawl that. And that's going to be an issue for exposure and all of those things. So make sure to check that out because you want to make sure that that is something that is not happening, obviously, especially if you're searching or looking to improve search stuff. And for you, Katie, what I noticed is that actually it is showing up now, but it's not number one. So it looks like it's maybe crawling up, it's getting close to the top, maybe related to a change that happened recently. So something to look into, something to be aware of. And then the general idea that you hear about getting in front of people, how do you get in front of people, how do you build traffic, how do you build a following? It is like the problem to solve, the thing that people want to know about. And my response is probably pretty familiar and it's probably stuff that you've heard before. And the thing is, it's not an easy thing to do. But this is what I would say if I was going about doing this, if I was thinking of working, building a new site, this is how we'd approach it and how we do approach it with the content that we're doing. We think about who are the people that we're serving and getting really specific with that. So an example would be for wptasty, which is a new blog and a new business that we're working on. Raquel and Ann over there at wptasty, working on the content over there, as well as customer support. If you've interacted with them, you. You've been able to see some of the really intentional content work that they've been doing. And we know the people that we're talking to and it's beginner to intermediate bloggers. And we know the type of stuff that we want to be talking about. And it's affiliate marketing and it's Pinterest and it's SEO and we are creating and by we, I don't want to take too much credit for it. It is really Raquel and Ann that are leading the charge over there, are creating really awesome content I.e. long form content and super, super helpful. An example would be the affiliate marketing post that they recently did. If you go and check that out, you can, and we'll link to that in the show notes. You can see that it's a really substantial piece of content. There's a lot of questions that are answered within that. There's a lot of really good screenshots that they have and it takes a lot of time to create that piece of content. And for you, Katie, as you think about the space that you're working in with nutrition, to really drill down and say, who are the people that I'm talking to? How can I create really substantial, awesome content? And then what does that look like to get that in front of people? And that last piece is the hard piece. And I just want to say this before I forget about it. Another good example of that as we think about doing this with Pinch of Yum. Lindsey recently did a freezer meals post and it wasn't just like a freezer meals recipe. It was 12 individual recipes with really specific examples of why the freezer meals are helpful. She's talking about that as we go into this phase where she's stepping back for maternity leave. So kind of tied into her story. She created with Jenna on our team these really awesome printables that go along with it that you can download for free. Did photo shoots for the 12 different recipes. And she actually went through and did a photo shoot and realized that the, the photos that she had didn't look the way that she wanted and went back and redid a lot of them. And it took hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of time. But the end result is we have this really substantial piece of content. And I think that oftentimes as content creators, we think about, I need to get a piece of content out the door just so my blog continues to be alive. And so I'm creating something that people interact with. And so I've checked off the publish box. But, but what we don't think about is how specific is this content and who is it for and why is it going to be a, let's say, top 10 on the Internet piece of content. And if you can confidently say, I'm creating a piece of content and I know who it's for and I consider this to be a top 10 piece of content in terms of how helpful it is. That's the type of content that you need to be creating as you think about getting, as you talked about getting your blog in front of people. It's so often not a trick or a tip or something that you do with social media that really helps out. More often than not, it's having a really good understanding of who it is that you're speaking to, the problem that you're trying to solve for them, and then creating content that is top 10 content. It's the content that is in a lot of ways better than any of the other content out there, which is a really, really high bar to set and it's really hard to do. And if you think about professional athletes, there's only so many professional athletes because it's this really high bar. And you think about how much they practice, how much time they spend thinking about strategy, reviewing film, how much time they spend working with a coach. These are the types of things that you need to think about. When you think about the content that you're creating. You're trying to be in your niche, in your category, the the professional athlete you are the professional content creator. And if your goal is to increase traffic and be the authority for a certain category, that's how you need to think about it. You need to think of yourself as the professional athlete for that. And if you do that, that will help you to level up how you approach and how you go about thinking, thinking about the content and the level of that content that you produce. And like I said, it's not a tip, it's not a trick, it's not a hack, but it's a mindset. And that mindset is so important to have as you think about building a following online. The other thing that I think is really important is to think about the things that don't scale. How do you make one to one connections and do what you can to be a source of value, a source of inspiration, somebody who's helpful to that one to one connection that you have. So instead of saying, hey, can I do a guest post for you? Or hey, can you promote this specific piece of content? It starts with reaching out to somebody and saying, hey, maybe it's somebody who has a blog that's similar to yours or somebody that you aspire to be. Like it's reaching out to them and saying, hey, I loved this thing that you produced. I love your Instagram account, I love this resource that you have. And I just wanted to let you know, I shared it on social media, I linked to it in a blog post. I really found it inspirational and I've shared it with a couple friends via email and that's it. And leaving it at that and maybe having multiple touch points with that person where there's zero ask. And who knows how long that lasts. Maybe it's, you know, three months, six months, one year. And eventually there might come a time where there is an ask involved. And if you have a history of giving, if you don't start the relationship by asking if you have a history of giving and that person has that context, there is a higher chance that they are willing to reciprocate that. But so often what happens is we try and connect with people in order to push our agenda. Instead of connecting with people and pushing their agenda first, doing what you can to be helpful to them, knowing that someday there might be a time when that is reciprocated. And so that kind of goes hand in hand with this idea of creating that top 10 type of content. You also need to have these people that you're connected with, these one to run relationships, these established connections, because those are helpful as you start to build and get traction, but they're only helpful if you have established those as authentic, true giving relationships as opposed to a relationship where you are asking right away. And realistically that takes months and months and oftentimes years for those types of relationships to form. And it takes a lot of work as well. And it's one to one, it's individual and it's not quick. And so both of these things have to do with delaying the gratification that you get from kind of that quick ping, publishing a piece of content and feeling like, hey, I did it, but instead delaying that out, taking your time, building relationships, working on long form, really high value top 10 content. And what will happen is that snowball, both relationally from the people you're connecting with as well as with the content from the traction that you get from that. And hopefully the traffic that comes from that will be able to build that snowball, will be able to build in a way that it doesn't. If you kind of have these quick pings and one off pieces of content that you are, that you're publishing. So the great thing is, Katie, for you is you have this history of blogging, you're familiar with it. When I go to your site, it looks beautiful, you've done a great job with it, it's really well designed and you have a consistent history of publishing content, which is great and super helpful. And so I think it's a matter of, like you said in the post, kind of taking that dive into it and saying, hey, I'm going to really take this seriously. I'M going to think strategically and you're off to a great start, so keep up the good work. Really great to connect and thanks for submitting the thing that's working for you and also the thing that you're trying to work through. Katie and so excited to stay connected with you and watch you continue to grow. Hey nutrition lady.

Hi Bjork. My name is Mary and the name of my food blog is marysnest.com I'm very new to all of this, but what is working well for me is making videos and embedding them in my blog. I use a canon EOS rebel SL2 on a tripod with a lavalier mic and film myself across my kitchen island as I show how to make traditional foods such as bone broths and so on and so forth. I embed the video in my blog and I am very happy how it has all turned out. However, I think the biggest thing I struggle with is keeping up with all the social media. I want to distribute my content while also keep up with viewing and commenting on all my online friends content. I find that tending to social media could take up my whole day if I let it. Thanks for any insight you have to share.

Hey there Mary. Fun to hear your little audio clip and explore your channel a little bit and to hear what's working well and what's not working well. First, a quick little comment about what's working well. Love, love love that you are doing video and also video where you are in front of the camera. That's so hard to do. It's hard to do video in general, but extremely hard to be the person in front of the camera talking to the camera and engaging the audience from in front of the lens as opposed to behind it or just doing kind of the standard hands and pans type video. So good work. You should be proud of the work that you've done so far with those videos. That's awesome. And a quick note to other people that haven't yet explored video. I'd encourage you to give it a shot to see what it feels like and to explain. Explore the different ways where you might want to jump in and create video because it's going to continue to become more and more important for us. Us being content creators, people that listen to this podcast to figure out how they communicate through these kind of 2.0 or 3.0 forms of media. Whether that be audio like it's happening right now with this podcast or video. As bandwidth becomes more available even in rural areas in small towns, they're starting to get fast Internet and can watch video pretty seamlessly. There's not a lot of the buffering that happens even in places that traditionally didn't have good Internet. And so what's happening is video is becoming more important because it's a more vibrant type of media. You're able to connect more, communicate easier. Much is the same. Or the same can be said and much like is true for audio, and audio is that same kind of thing. People know me, they understand me, they know a little bit more context around who I am by listening to this podcast. And video does that same thing, especially if you're able to be in front of the camera and what a great skill that is to develop. So good work on that, Mary. Love, love, love that you were doing that. And one of the things that you talked about is kind of on the other side, something that's more difficult or that you're working through or trying to figure out is this idea of social media. And social media can be a total time suck, like you said and like you talked about. You could spend the entire day just surfing around on social media and posting and interacting and commenting, supporting your friends, which you mentioned, which I think is so cool. And it showcases who you are and what you're about by the fact that you say, hey, I want to support my other friends who are online and doing social media, which makes sense and is awesome. A couple things as it relates to social media, this might apply to you, Mary, or to the broader podcast audience. I think it's really important for us as creators to think about the places where we are naturally drawn. Where are the places that make sense for us to be creators, because those are going to be the places that we are going to want to focus. And for me, for instance, I spend almost no time on social media on a week to week or month to month basis. And we run an online business. I run an online business. But that's very different than Lindsay. Lindsey loves Instagram. That's a place for her where she feels very much so at home and loves to think about creating content on Instagram that connects with people and to have conversations on Instagram. So we are different in that way. I have almost no social media presence, whereas Lindsay's intentional to say, hey, what does it look like for me to live and to operate both the brand of Pinch of Yum as well as Lindsay individually on social media? So. So point there is that it's important to remember that even if you are building something online, it doesn't mean that you have to be the person that is creating social media posts or posting to social media or spending a bunch of time in your different social accounts. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't use social media to support your business. I think we just need to think strategically about what is the thing that really excites us and what is the most important thing. And for most of us, the most important thing is creating really valuable, accessible and targeted content for our followers. Now, obviously, you need to promote that somewhere. That has to. You have to build in some type of system to give that exposure, but you don't always have to be the person that is doing that. And we have, for instance, just a short example is that for the Food Blogger Pro podcast, one of the things that we do is we take a short little snippet and we post it to our Instagram account in video format. Now, that's not me posting to the Food Blogger Pro Instagram, but it's us as a team saying, hey, we know Instagram is an important platform. What are the ways that as a brand, we can use Instagram to engage with and connect with our audience? And that's one of the ways that we've decided to do it, because we have this podcast. I enjoy doing the podcast. And so what are the ways that we can then lean into another platform without having to spend a bunch of time, you know, crafting original content for that platform? Another thing to consider is to spend time thinking about the one platform that you love and become an expert on that platform. And I think what happens too often is that we, as individual creators, we do everything for our blog. We manage WordPress, we manage all the social media accounts, we create the content, we do the photographs, we shoot the video, and it just becomes so much. And then we also think that we have to, you know, have these really strong. A really strong presence on every one of these social accounts. But what I would encourage you to do in the early stages is to think about what is the single platform that I feel like I can operate and understand and that I'm most drawn to and go deep on that single platform. And for you, Mary, I feel like, you know, in. In the amount of time that I spent looking at what you're doing and what you're up to, hearing your audio clip, you talking through, what you like to do, the things that are working well, I hear you talking about video. So it makes a lot of sense for me when I look at your scenario as you're building your brand and as you're building your blog and as you're building your following to say, okay, I know that there are these other platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, whatever. It would be Snapchat if you want to go wide, but you don't have time for all of those. And if you're trying to do all of those, you're gonna be doing all of those at a subpar level just due to the time that you have in a day. So instead, think about the thing that you're drawn to, the one platform that makes the most sense for how you create content and think about content and publish content. And for you, that seems like YouTube. It makes a lot of sense to go deep on YouTube and to get a really good understanding of that as a social platform. And there's going to be an inherent loss in saying, okay, I'm saying no to these other platforms, I'm saying no to these other things. And this could be time management in general. In order to say yes to this one thing and to say yes in a really committed way, that's going to have a big impact. And it's not to say that that's forever and that you never touch any of those other platforms, but you want to focus on a single platform until you feel like, okay, I have created systems around it. I know the how to optimize for this platform. I know what I'm doing. And now I. I've found that I have some margin to build in another thing. And maybe that additional thing is then posting videos to Instagram, for instance, where it's kind of related. There's a little bit of overlap, but it allows you to expand out a little bit. So you might miss out on some of the conversations with people that you're connected with and friends. But I think that's a necessary and important thing to cut out at for a limited amount of time. Maybe it's six months, maybe it's a year. In order for you to go deep in a single platform, to say no to one area, in order to say yes to another area, to go deep on that single platform, to learn it, to optimize for it, to develop systems around it where you're not having to learn every single time or relearn, you know, the best way to do something. And once you have established that, once you've mastered that, then you can kind of layer in little pieces beyond that and example for us, what we do, I feel like that for us is the podcast. So that's the area that I've decided to go really deep on as a creator. And then we use that, like I said, to cross promote in other areas, whether that be Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. But we've realized, or I've realized that I can't do everything. And so it's not that we're completely shut off for these other platforms, but there's only one that I've really decided to stick to and to go deep on in order to do that well. And as we grow and as we have more resources, we're able to then spin up additional things. For instance, we didn't have the resources before to do Instagram for wptasty, but we finally gotten to the point where our team and Abby is leading the charge on this, is saying, okay, I'm going to start to think about what does Instagram look like for wptasty? We couldn't do that before. Or if we rewind the tape way back for Pinch of Yum. It was for a long time really limited in what we were doing. We were doing essentially Instagram and maybe Facebook a little bit. And there was a time where Lindsay didn't, or Pinch of Yum really didn't have any presence on Pinterest, even though it was a huge traffic driver for us. We just knew that there was a draw to a certain area and also that that area had proven engagement and performance. And those two things have to match up. You can't, you can't justify spending a lot of time on a place that doesn't have a lot of people there. So it's not like you could, you know, let's say Snapchat if you have 10 people, but you love it, it maybe makes sense to go to a platform where you have more people who are going to see it and be exposed to what you. You're doing. But the basic idea is you want to find the thing that you're drawn to, focus on that, go deep on that, and then start to fold in things later on. So for anybody listening that feels overwhelmed with social media, I want to let you know it's okay to say no. And that's not a forever thing. That's a temporary thing. And you can go deep in one area and then start to add on later on as you start to figure it out and get some momentum in that singular platform. So, Mary, great job. Keep up the good work with the video and excited to stay connected with you and watch you continue to grow your blog and your brand and the followers that you have online. So good work.

Hi, my name is Sarah Cook and I am the founder of Sustainable Cooks and yes, I'm a food blogger with the last name of Cook. I know what's working well for me right now. I had a reawakening of just passion and intensity for blogging last summer. Thanks actually to Finding the Food Process Blogger Pro podcast. Until that moment I was I was ready to quit and give up because after seven years of blogging I had lost traction and readers and my page views were actually plummeting. I was stuck and I did not know what I was doing. Discovering the podcast and others, I learned that everything I didn't know about blogging could fill a freaking ocean. I spent an enormous amount of time educating myself on SEO, blogging, best practices and photography after finding the podcast and photography is my least favorite part about blogging. Thanks to Food Blogger Pro, I've gone through an extensive redesign and rebrand. I've done an SEO audit with Casey and I now work with Andrew from the Blog Tutor. If you were to look at my site last year and compare it to this year, the differences are night and day. I feel professional and I feel motivated each and every day to do the best for my readers. I've also shifted my mindset from me to we. I now keep my reader at the front of my mind with every decision I make about the blog. It's no longer what I want, but what my readers have told me and shown me that they need. And my readers in Google are starting to reward me for my efforts with increased page views and traffic. One thing I'm struggling with just one My biggest issue right now is finding the time to fix eight years worth of mistakes. I started on Blogger and never even used a recipe plugin until last year. I know, tragic. Fixing things I didn't do correctly the first time takes all my energy and time right now. I also have two younger kids, so balancing their needs with my work requirements means a lot of very late nights and 4am mornings. In fact, I'm currently hiding in my closet to record this so they don't scream into the computer. But I love what I do and I've only grown more and more in love with the this profession. So thank you so much.

Sarah. So incredibly fun to hear your audio clip, to hear your call, whatever it is we're calling these. But to hear you talk about number one, having the last name cook with a food blog. Awesome. And without you having to do any work. Spot on branding. So good work on that. And number two, so fun to hear you talk about the finding the podcast and Having the podcast be that thing that kind of lights a spark or lights a fire for you to continue working on the blog, but not only just to continue working on it, but with, with a new passion and intensity. And I love the hustle that you demonstrate by ducking away into a closet and recording the, the audio clip to submit to the podcast, which is so fun and so relatable. I remember there was a time when we were living in the Philippines, so Lindsay and I lived in the Philippines for a year. And that's when we were first starting Food Blogger Pro. And I was recording a video and it was super loud because we lived in a neighborhood where there's just a lot of noise, there's some dogs barking. And I remember in the distance somebody was doing karaoke. And I, and I knew that I needed to record this tutorial for the first round of tutorials that we're doing for Food Blogger Pro. And I went into this back room and it was super hot out, but I, but I threw this blanket over my head to deaden the noise that was coming in. And I just remember sitting with my laptop, the mic and a blanket in like 80 degree humid heat in this back little room recording this, this video for Food Blogger Pro. And so imagining you kind of tucked away in a closet recording an audio submission, so, so you don't get any of that kid background noise kind of reminded me of that time for me. And, and I just love, love to hear how you have found that new passion and intensity for blogging after doing it for a while. And the good thing is that you have this history in this background and this content built up through the years. And you kind of talked about that a little bit, this idea that you've been doing this for a really long time and have this kind of foundation, but now you're realizing, hey, I gotta kind of rework what this foundation looks like in order to have it be really solid. Solid. It's almost like these concrete jigsaw pieces. And right now they aren't all locked together. And you're kind of working to say, okay, this is going to be a really strong foundation. I don't have to bring in any more material necessarily, or at least at this point you don't. And now the thing is, how do these pieces fit together? So the foundation is strong. You have the history and the content. And now it's putting those things together, which, like you said, isn't an easy thing to do. And I think it's worth acknowledging that a couple things that I feel like are worth mentioning and worth looking into and worth thinking about. One thing I would caution you on is that I think there is the potential to, once you get into it, to see all of the things that could be fixed or enhanced or tweaked. And it's kind of like moving into a house. So I'm sitting in our house here in St. Paul, Minnesota, and you know, when I look around, even in the room that I'm in right now, I can see, okay, it's hardwood floors. They're these beautiful original hardwood floors. But it's a different color in different rooms like they were before we moved in. One area was finished, another area wasn't. If I look up above me, the ceiling has some little like fractures and cracks in it. I know that outside the stucco is kind of falling apart in a certain area. When we first moved in, the sidewalk was all out of sorts and the lawn was kind of non existent as a foreclosure. We moved in. So there's a lot of work that we had to do. And what we had to do is say, okay, what are the things that are going to have the biggest, most substantial impact? What is the cost, both in time and dollars? And then how do we prioritize? And I think for somebody in your situation, a similar analysis is worth doing. And I think it's helpful to actually have an equation. It can be a really, really simple equation, but to have an equation that helps you bubble up to the top what those priorities are going to be and then complement that with continuing to produce content. So it's kind of the repair and build. And you don't want to be just repairing and you don't want to be just building. You want to be doing both and to be doing both consistently to the point at which it becomes less advantageous to repair than it does to build. And what I mean by that is there are things, much like in our house, where they could totally be fixed, but it's probably not worth our time right now to focus in on those things because we still have more important things that we need to do with your blog, with your site. The same is probably true. There are no doubt substantial things that you need to do. An example would be transitioning from Blogger or blogspot to WordPress. That's a huge change and would be a really big priority. And another example would be using a recipe plugin. And you mentioned that what a huge win that's going to be to make that transition and to make that update and. But there will be some point that you get to where suddenly it becomes less advantageous to fix the things, even though there will be things to fix than it is to build and to continue to add to your pool of content or to create new things. And that is true for Pinch of Yum, for Food Blogger Pro, for, you know, all of the sites that we run, there are things that are could be enhanced or fixed or tweaked that currently exist that we've decided it's more valuable for us to focus our time on creating something new and to create a new thing than it is to go back and tweak and update and change. Because if you continually tweak and change and update, you'll be caught in that place forever for a really long time. You could constantly be optimizing old content. So that's why I think it's important to do both at the same time, to continually think about what is, what is the past path forward, and then also, how do I look back and create something better behind me? How do I look at where I've been and not totally ignore that, but continue to move forward while also optimizing the things that you have, the previously posted content. So what I would recommend doing is using Excel or Apple's numbers program, which is free if you have a Mac computer or Google spreadsheets or sheets. Google Sheets, if you have that, is to create a really, really basic little equation and to create a list of all the different things that you feel like you could optimize. And so one column would be the all of the different things that you could enhance. And in that column you would have things like, you know, switching to WordPress, adding a recipe plugin or recipe card. Maybe it's optimizing the alt text for posts. So that's optimized from an SEO perspective. And you have this list of, let's say 10, 20, 30, 40. Who knows how long that list is? And then next to each one of those, you add additional little items or you'd add additional qualifiers or numbers or metrics that that would be in these different categories. Number one would be the impact. And some of these you're not going to know, right? You're just going to have to go with your gut and say, what is the actual impact of these? And I would do, let's say 1 to 5, a scale of 1 to 5. What is the impact? 1 to 5. It could be super substantial, a really big impact 5. And then you can say, what is the time? And in this case, I would use five as the Quickest and then one as this is going to be really slow. So five is quick, one is slow. So you create another column that has one through five for speed. And then you say, what is the cost? So how expensive is this going to be? 1 through 5, five being the cheapest, one being the most expensive. There might be additional things that you think of that you'd want to add that can be part of that equation. But after you have that list, you have that total brain dump of all the different projects that you need to do. You've put everything down, whether it's a tiny little micro project or a really big, substantial expensive project. You put all of that down and then you, in the, in the very last column there, what you do is you add those up and say, okay, what is the thing that is going to be most impactful, most affordable and what is the thing that is also going to be cheapest? And any of those other factors that you put in. And that's not going to be the perfect formula. It's not going to get you the exact calculation that you need in order to fully understand what the next step is. But what it will give you is a little bit of guidance on what the next most important thing to do is. And we did this actually, Raquel and I. Raquel does the, she's the product lead for wptasty. We had a meeting and we said, okay, what are the most important marketing things to do? And we were kind of spitball ideas and talked about a few things and we said, hey, I think it makes better to use this exact equation that we, that I just shared with you here to just get a better idea of prioritizing what the most important thing to do is. And again, it's not a fail safe science tested process to understand what to do next, but it's helpful in order to just provide a little bit of clarity around what the next most important thing to do is. And for us that allowed us to say, okay, you know, we've realized that probably a really easy thing to do that we haven't yet implemented and that we could do with no cost is in the specific case of wptasty, I'm trying to remember back exactly what it was. This is, I think this is what it was. But maybe this is just an example implementing follow up emails. So if you ever buy a wptasty product, you'll see one of the follow up emails in the sequence is, is letting people know about the affiliate program. So it's building in this little word of mouth system that allows people to say, oh, I know if I signed up for and buy a WP Tasty plugin, if I like that, then I can promote it to my followers and let them know that I use it and then get referral fees from that. So it builds in a little bit of viral marketing. And it was really easy to do, it was free and didn't take much time. And there might be those things for you as you process through the important projects that you have to hit. And you'll be able to work through that list in the order that the spreadsheet creates it. So that would be my encouragement to you to provide some clarity around, like, what the next best step is going to be. And you can use that as a living, breathing document. Maybe you get into a project and realize, oh, this is actually really hard. You change the time for a project from five to three, or maybe you get a quote from somebody and. And you know, you realize that something you wanted to have developed on your site is really, really expensive, so you change the cost associated with that. Again, it's not perfect, but it's going to provide a little bit of clarity around what the next best thing to work on is going to be and will allow you to continue to move forward on that and to continue to make progress. And one thing that I think is important is to keep that list where you don't remove the things after you complete them, or if you do, move them to another spreadsheet where you're able to track and say, okay, I can see that I've made progress on these things, because that's one of the most motivating things. You're passionate right now. You have that desire to continue building and growing, and it's important to see the fruit of your labor in some way, to have some type of log that shows you the things that you have done and completed. So. So as you work through that list and kind of build that strong foundation for yourself, I would encourage you to keep track of that so you can continue to stay passionate and engaged and excited, realizing all the things that you're actually doing. So, great, inspiring little audio clip for me, Sarah, to hear that the podcast was helpful for you. I hope it continues to be that. And I know that your little clip will be encouraging and motivating for other people as well. So it was a little bit of paying that back. So thank you for taking the time to submit that, for being a part of the podcast and excited to watch you continue to grow sustainable cooks and love that you're able to include your last name in your blog name with in a way that maybe people don't even realize, which is kind of fun. So that is a wrap for this podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. It was fun to switch things up a little bit, do it a little bit differently. And so thankful to Katie, Mary, and Sarah for being a part of the podcast today. We're gonna see how this goes and would love to hear your feedback on this if it'd be something that you'd be interested in hearing more of. Podcast episodes that are a little bit different like this. And one of the things that we know to be really, really true is that we have this incredible group of people that listen to this podcast, and there are some really cool things that you, as the listeners, can share with other listeners. And we, we were hoping that this podcast allowed us to surface some of those things and to have some conversations directly around the things that people are having some success around, sharing those and then processing through some of those harder problems that people are working through and trying to get a better idea of how they can work through those problems, can find some answers to those and continue to build and grow your blog or your business or whatever it is that you're using this podcast for to do a little bit better. So thank you so much for tuning in for being a part of this podcast. And shout out to our podcast producer, Alexa, for all the work that she does in helping to make this happen. So we will catch you guys in one week. Same time, same place, same bat time, same bat place. Thanks, guys. Sam.