202: WP Tasty - Our Early Stage Strategy for Building Traffic and Marketing with Bjork Ostrom

Hello, hello, hello. Bjork Ostrom here. And I am excited to tell you a little bit about a new little series that we're doing here for the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are calling this series Projects. And the series is about projects, specifically projects that we're working on here at Food Blogger Pro. Now, the thing is, many of you might know this, but Food Blogger Pro isn't just Food Blogger Pro. We also have a lot of businesses that are associated with Food Blogger Pro or in some people's minds, a lot of there are. There are businesses that Food Blogger Pro is associated with. So kind of the other way around. For those that aren't as familiar with kind of the suite of products or the portfolio of sites that we as a team work on, the quick overview is we have Pinch of Yum. Pinch of Yum is the food and recipe site that Lindsey, my wife, works on. We have an incredible team for that that helps out. Maybe you've interacted with some of those folks. Over on Pinch of Yum, we have Food Blogger Pro, which you're probably familiar with if you're listening to this podcast. Food Blogger Pro is a membership site. So the core of what we do, the main focus is on the actual members of Food Blogger Pro. So there are thousands of people from around the world that are members of Food Blogger Pro. Maybe you are one of them. If you are, we appreciate you and are so honored to be a part of the community with you. And some of you might just be podcast listeners. We appreciate you as well. And a huge reason why we do this podcast is because we have listeners. And without you, obviously we wouldn't be doing this. So Food Blogger Pro is known to people either on the membership side of things or the podcast side of things. And for a lot of people, both, they are both podcasts listeners and members. And we have wptasty. Wptasty is the WordPress plugin site that we developed because we realized that we were creating a lot of custom solutions for Pinch of Yum recipe plugin. We were creating a Pinterest plugin that allowed us to optimize our images on the blog for Pinterest, that's called Tasty Pins. And we also were using and developing plugins like Tasty Links, which allows you to really easily link content on your site. And just today, at least when we're recording this podcast, it also allows you to create really good looking boxes or little product promotion blocks, as you would call it in WordPress on your site. And it allows you to create affiliate links for certain products, and to do that in a way that really looks slick. And last but not least, we have nutrifox. Nutrifox is for recipe bloggers, for people who are publishing food content and they want to include a recipe. So if you've ever been to Pinch of Yum and you look at one of the recipes, there's a really good chance that we have nutrition information, and that's been calculated and the label generated by nutrifox. And as it relates to this podcast series projects, you can imagine that we have a lot of projects at any given time going on behind the scenes for any of these businesses. And the nice thing is, for these different businesses is they're all at different areas of their growth. And a lot of times we talk about Pinch of Yum. Pinch of Yum has been around for nine years. So it's an established website, it's an established business. And sometimes what can happen is when we talk about the things that we're doing on Pinch of Yum, it's at a very different stage than somebody who's in the first year, two years, or three years of building their blog, their website, or their business online. But what we don't talk about as often is these other sites that we're in the earlier stage with. Wptasty and nutrifox would be good examples of that. Obviously, Food Blogger Pro has been around a little bit longer, but in terms of the maturity of each site, it probably goes nutrifox, WP Tasty, Food Blogger Pro, and Pinch of Yum. And that doesn't mean that they're not healthy. They're just not as mature. Some are not as far along in their business development as the others. And so what we're gonna do with this series projects is we' going to talk about different projects that are happening behind the scenes. And these are going to be projects that you can probably relate to because we're trying to solve similar problems to a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast. For instance, one of the problems that we're trying to solve for WP Tasty is we're trying to solve the problem of traffic growth and marketing. That combination of marketing really well and then also growing traffic. And that's going to be the project that I'm talking about today. Now, I'm not going to be talking just specifically about traffic as it relates to wptasty, but I'm going to be talking about some of the why behind that traffic. And I think that's one of the most Important things to think about. When we think about building traffic, it's the why, why are you building traffic? What is the intent behind it and what are you doing with that? When people come to your site, are you really intentional with how you treat those people and what it looks like to maintain that relationship with? Or is it kind of like walking into a store and nobody greets them, nobody offers to help them out, nobody offers them next steps, nobody tells them what products you have available. You can imagine if that happened in a store, it wouldn't be a great experience and there'd be a really good chance that you wouldn't come back. So what we're trying to do with WP Tasty, the project that we're working on right now is thinking intentionally about both how do we bring people onto the site, and then once people come onto the site, what does that look like to maintain that relationship and that conversation moving forward? And I'm going to talk about that today and how we're handling that project for WP Tasty. So to explain a little bit of what's going on at WP Tasty, we have those three plugins that I mentioned before. Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins and Tasty Links. And as we think about wptasty as a site, one of the most important transactions that happens is the eventual transaction of somebody purchasing one of those plugins. We have thousands and thousands of people who are active paying members for wptasty. And the great thing is we have a extremely low churn rate, which means that people aren't canceling once they sign up. So we know we have calculations that we can see, hey, once somebody signs up, we know that they're going to stick around for a while, they're going to not cancel. It's not like some products where you test it out for a couple months and then you just cancel. The churn rate for WP Tasty is really low. And the the reason is because these are our sticky products, meaning once people use them, they want to continue to use them. And we also do a really good job and we're really intentional about having support ongoing. That's one of the most important things with Software, especially with WordPress, is that you have incredible support available. And Ann, Amber and Raquel do an incredible job all managing and interacting on the support side of things. And if you are a WPTC user, maybe you've been lucky enough to connect with them and to talk with them because they are really incredible people. And we're just honored to have them as Part of our team. So a little bit of a tangent, but we know that for WP Tasty, the why, the long term why of why somebody would come to the site is because eventually the interaction that we'd have with them, the hopeful transaction is to purchase a plugin, to purchase one of the products that we sell. So the nice thing about that is it's relatively clear. We know where people are going, we know where we want people to go. So we can be intentional about how, how we build that out when we think about bringing traffic to the site. So let's talk a little bit about where traffic is at right now for wptasty. I pulled up Google Analytics before hitting record on this and the numbers for WP Tasty. We have 20 to 25,000 page views a month coming to the site. Now. That includes people that are coming to their account that they're logging in. That includes people that are looking at product pages. That includes people that are going to the homepage. 20 to 25,000 page views a month right now, on average. But the thing that I want to look at is actually the content marketing side of things. So if you go to wptacey.com blog that will bring you to the page where we are publishing content for, for WP Tasty, we're doing content marketing right now that is landing between 5 to 7,000 page views a month. So these are people that are coming, they're learning about something, they're reading a blog post that we've written. That's the area where we're going to focus on moving forward. That's the project that I'm going to be talking about is what we're doing to build up those page views so we can get to a point where the more people that are coming, hopefully we also then see an uptick in the purchases that are happening for WP Tasty products. So a little bit about what we're doing, we need to think really intentional about how we're going to go about building this. Right? So it's different than Pinch of Yam. Pinch of Yam has millions of page views. But wptasty, it's an early site, it doesn't have as much traction and it definitely doesn't have as much content. So we need to start. It's kind of like we're starting from zero with our content strategy. I'm going to be talking about what we're doing, the groundwork that we're laying in order for us to have a really healthy content site moving forward. The first thing that we have started to do is we've spent some time in a tool called Ahrefs. And Ahrefs is all about SEO and SEO optimization. So. So with Ahrefs, the great thing about that is there's lots of different ways that you can use it. One way is to do keyword research, which I'm going to talk a little bit about, and to do a little bit of an analysis of what keywords are available and to do an analysis of the competition around those keywords. But the first thing I want to talk about is actually a tool within ahrefs and that's spelled A, H, R, E, F S. It's kind of hard to pronounce ahrefs, which is the HTML for a link. That's kind of the story behind that tool. SEOmoz is a competitor and comparable. But the nice thing about ahrefs is there's this area that you can go to called Site Audit. And what Site audit does is it goes through your site and it does an analysis of any areas that might be considered weak on your site, any areas that you could potentially improve. This would allow you to go and see, okay, maybe these images are missing alt text or we just looked through and we said, hey, this page on our site is actually no indexed, meaning Google isn't going and crawling it. We need to update that. So one of the first things that we're doing is just making sure the ground, the groundwork, the ground that we are building our house on is healthy. Right? We want a strong foundation to build our content site on and we're using the site audit within Ahrefs to do that. We want to make sure that all of the low hanging fruit is optimized. So all of our pages have meta descriptions that those meta descriptions are written really well. All of our images have alt text. We want to make sure that within Yoast, the plugin that we use for SEO, that we're putting in a keyword. And that's not the ultimate answer, right? So it's not the thing that's going to make the post show up higher, just provides a little bit of guidance and says here are some things that you can optimize around that if you haven't listened to, to the podcast interview we did with the founder of Yoast, you can make sure to check that out to get a little bit more background on how you can go about optimizing and improving your site using that plugin and that episode. There's actually two ways that you can check that out. One, for Those that are members of Food Blogger Pro, there's a Yoast SEO course. And for those of you that are podcast listeners, you can go to episode 91, which is foodbloggerpro.com 91, to hear the interview with the founder of that plugin. And he talks about how you can use that specifically with recipe sites. So we're using the site audit within Ahrefs to make sure that our site is healthy. Right now, if you look at the little rank that we have within Ahrefs, I think we're at 92%, which is pretty good. But there's a few other things that we need to optimize and take care of. And again, that is one of those tools where there might be some suggestions they make that you don't necessarily have to move forward on. For instance, there might be pages on your site that are no indexed for a reason. You want those to be no indexed, and so you would just ignore that suggestion. But we're going through or making sure that we optimize all of the areas and all of the nooks and crannies that we normally don't see are brought to the surface using tools like Ahrefs and then within WordPress, using a plugin like Yoast to make sure we are optimized for search. The next thing that we're doing is we're thinking strategically about the buckets that, that we want to be creating content in. And for us, the buckets correlate specifically to the products that we have. So a really easy bucket for us to create content around is Pinterest because we have a plugin called TastyPins which allows people to optimize different ways for Pinterest within their blog content. We know that if we talk about Pinterest and how as a creator you can build your Pinterest account, that's gonna be a really good type of content to have conversations then around or introduce people to tasty pins. So that is one of the buckets, Recipe SEO and just general best practices as it relates to food blogs and recipe blogs and optimizing those is a great bucket because we have tasty recipes. The recipe plugin that we use on Pinch of Yum and hundreds and thousands of other people use it on their site as well. And the reason why recipe SEO and optimization is a good category, a good bucket for us is because of tasty recipes. So you can see that we're being intentional about the niche, the niche type content that we're creating and making sure that that content correlates to a product that we have to an area that we want to be continuing the conversation with for people that come to the site. And the last one is any type of strategy around affiliate marketing for bloggers, because that ties to Tasty Links, which is the plugin that allows you to really easily create links. It doesn't have to be affiliate links, but really easy create easily create links around. Most. Most people use it around affiliate content. So those are the buckets for this project. As we think about content marketing that we're thinking about the content that we're going to be creating. It is Pinterest type content. It is recipe, SEO and food blog content, and then it is affiliate marketing content. We're using ahrefs to do some keyword research around that. And keyword research simply means the process of researching a keyword. And a keyword is something that somebody would search on Google. So an example would be if you're a food blogger, you know, the keyword is often a recipe. So it's something like banana bread or chocolate chip cookies or tomato soup recipe. Those are all keywords. Those exist in all different industries. And for us, the keywords might be something like recipe, SEO or Best Pinterest image size, things like that. Those are all keywords that are important for wptasty. And what we do is we can look at ahrefs, we can type in those keywords. We can see other suggestions for generally better keywords, like maybe we're being way too specific and there's a more general keyword that we should use, or we're being too general and we should be a little bit more specific. An example for that would be if we would search or use the keyword just Pinterest. That's gonna be really competitive and it's gonna be hard for us to show up anywhere. So we need to get a little bit more specific in the keyword. The topic that we're focusing on, we use ahrefs to get an understanding of what those keywords could be, as well as the competition surrounding those. Now, tools like this aren't perfect, but it just generally helps you brainstorm the process for those. Now, here's the fun thing. We understand the content creation process, right? So we use WordPress. We're starting to use co Schedule. We're just really early into that. For wptasty, it's a integrated part of Pinch of Yum. But again, we're at different stages. Wptasty is a little bit earlier. We're just getting into content marketing. And so for this project for our content marketing project for wptasty, we're just starting to use co schedule. So if you are earlier on in your content creation process, maybe you can relate to that. Because this team, our team, myself included, we're starting to learn what is that like, how do you use co schedule? What are the ways that we want to set it up for our business. So once we have those keywords, we're starting to expand on those and get a little bit of an outline, an idea of what would be included within that content. I won't go into the specifics of the content writing process because I think most of us understand what that looks like, the best practices for that, and how you want to go about doing that. But after that, one of the things that we are starting to do is we're starting to be really intentional about remarketing, or some people would call it retargeting. What this means is you can use or you can sign up for the remarketing or retargeting account for different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram. This isn't social media, but there's Google Ads, there's Pinterest, there's YouTube. You can sign up to have an advertising account. And what remarketing means is anytime that somebody comes to a site, it'll do something that's called pixeling them. You will get pixeled. Now, a pixel literally is a single pixel that exists on a website and you can't see it. But what it does is it allows you to tag people, to track people. It's kind of how Google Analytics works. You tag people and then that information of that browser in that visitor is saved. So if, for instance, you have a Facebook pixel on your website, what will happen is in the case of wptasty, if somebody comes to wptasty.com tasty recipes, they go to that page and they look at the content about tasty recipes. They've been pixeled. As somebody who has looked at a tasty recipes article or a Tasty recipes sales page, in this case the marketing page for tasty recipes. Now, Facebook knows that this person is connected to this page. And so what happens is when that person goes back to Facebook, we can show an ad related to tasty recipes because that person has been pixeled. Now, you can do this on all of those different platforms I mentioned, Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Pinterest, YouTube. There's all these different platforms that allow you to create a pixel that then connects somebody to a piece of content that they've been to on your site and allows you to decide what you want to do with that information. And for us, we're showing related ads to those people when they go back to those specific platforms. Now, why is this beneficial? Why is this a good thing? This is a good thing because it allows us to, in a way, continue the conversation to make sure that we are front of mind for that person that in some remote way showed interest in the thing that we were creating or the product that we had. This is really effective because you know that the ads that you're showing are to people who have some, some type of awareness of the product that you've created. It's not a cold exposure. It's not like you're coming to this person and introducing yourself for the first time. It's a reintroduction. You're remarketing, you're retargeting this person. It's not the first time that you've interacted with them. So that's one of the ways that we're being really strategic about our content creation, is making sure that as much as possible, when we're creating content that's tied to one of the buckets, like Pinterest, for example, that that is also tied to remarketing. So a visit isn't just a visit and then it goes away. A visit kind of has this multiplier. There's another leverage point that exists, which is the pixels for these different sites that allow us to continue the conversation after somebody leaves. So that's one of the ways that we're thinking of being strategic with our content creation process is making sure that anytime that we're publishing a new piece of content that it fits into one of those buckets and each one of those buckets is connected to some type of remarketing. Now, we're still really early stages with this, but my guess is that if you go to any of the pages on Tasty on wptasty, like the Tasty Recipes sales page or the tastypin sales page or Tasty Links, that what you'll see is as you cruise around the web and different platforms and stuff, you'll start to see some of those, some of those ads pop up because that's WP Tasty and the remarketing process happening. Now, the other thing that kind of ties into this that we're doing is we're creating buckets of email onboarding or email, as Matt would say in our previous podcast interview, Quick Start Guides. So if you go to wptasty.com what you'll see is you'll see generally the content that we're creating fits into different categories. For instance, Pinterest. So if you click on a post about Pinterest, there will be a prompt that will allow you to have Pinterest related content. Now, what we're in the process of doing, the project that we're currently working on is creating a Quick Start guide, as Matt would say, for these different buckets of content. Now, for those of you that didn't listen to that podcast, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com, podcast and the it's actually 201. So foodblockerpro.com 201 will get you there. Slash, podcast is just the homepage for the podcast. But Matt talks about email marketing for bloggers, and one of the things that he mentions about or mentions in that interview is this idea of a Quick Start Guide. And the Quick Start Guide is essentially a way for you to have a conversation with people around a certain topic and to do as much as possible to help them out. And so for us, we're doing that for each one of these buckets, Pinterest recipe, SEO and then eventually affiliate marketing as well. And the goal is to again, offer as much help as possible and to do that while also, when appropriate, mentioning or calling out the different things that you could offer. In our case, it would be products or plugins. So an example is we created our first email for the Pinterest guide that we're doing on essentially tactics and tools to increase your Pinterest following and increase your Pinterest traffic. So just as an example, I'm going to read this first email in the series and you can get an idea of how that works for us. So we've created a piece of content here. It's on the blog. If somebody goes and visits, they will be pixeled. So you'll see some of those ads after you leave. And you'll also have the option to sign up for the series that we do, explaining how to optimize some areas of Pinterest. So the email is called discover your shining stars on Pinterest. This is a draft version of it. So know that this might change. It's not going to be exactly the same, so you are seeing the first peek at it. So discover your shining stars on Pinterest. I'm just going to read through it day one of day day one of five days to optimize your Pinterest practices. So this is all around ways to optimize Pinterest and your Pinterest account. Here we go. What do you think of when you hear the phrase shining star? Do you think of Kelly Clarkson on season one of American Idol? Or maybe you think of LeBron James hitting a game winning shot in the NBA Finals? Want to know another example of a shining star? Your top performing pin on Pinterest. Here's an analogy for having a Pinterest account, but not knowing which pin is your shining star is like being the director of a choir and not knowing that Kelly Clarkson is a member. You gotta get that girl solo. The same is true for Pinterest accounts. You have hundreds or thousands of pins, but only a few of those pins are the shining stars. So what do you do? Find those shining stars and give them the mic. Here's how you can discover your shining stars on Pinterest. Now in this part of the email I go through and explain in Google Analytics how you can find your shining stars. I'll talk through it. It's not going to be the best because it's a podcast. In the email we'll have screenshots, but you'll get an idea. Here we go back into the email. Log into your Google Analytics account, go to Acquisition, then all traffic and then referrals. Find and click on the link that says pinterest.com in that list of referrals and you're now looking at your Pinterest shining stars. These are the URLs for the pins that are referring the most traffic to your blog. You can change the date in Google Analytics to see how your Pinterest shining stars change for a given time period. So the big question now is what do you do with those? I'm glad you asked. Here are two ideas for making sure your shining stars get the center stage. Number one, Repin your shining stars. I link here in the email so I'm gonna step out of the email and explain this a little bit. I say here's what a repin is and a link to it and why it's important. And then I link to a blog on blog post on WP Tasty back into the email. Make sure you repin your shining stars on a regular basis, especially if they are pins that are connected to your own Pinterest profile. You can use a tool like Tailwind to help you with the repin process and help make it a bit more manageable through automation. Number two Add a repin ID to the images on your blog. This is a ninja level tip. Are you ready for it? Pinterest has a feature that not many people know about. It's called the Repin id. The Repin ID allows you to connect an image on your blog with an already existing pin on Pinterest. This means that anytime someone creates a pin from your blog and they use that image on your blog, then they'll actually be repinning an image versus creating a new pin. The reason to do this is so you focus all of the quote, Pinterest juice, end quote towards your Shining Star pin. Instead of having your visitors create hundreds of individual pins without as much quote juice end quote, they'll instead be doubling or tripling down on the momentum that your Shining Star pin already has. Do you want an example? You can check out this post on Pinch of Yum and Repin an image to see how that works. And I link to a pin on Pinterest or on Pinch of Yum and then it says you can add a Repin ID to your images manually using HTML. But if you're more interested in the quote, make this really easy end quote solution. You can use Repin id. The Repin ID feature in Tasty Pins, I include a screenshot and then I say, there you go, first name. Now you know how to find your shining stars and give them the mic. It's time to sing. As they say in showbiz. That's a wrap, folks. In a couple days I'll be sending out a second email in the series where I'll be sharing a new type of content you can be sharing on Pinterest and the incredible impact it can have on your Pinterest following and traffic. So that's an example of the first image, the first email in the series that we're doing a five email series that people would see once they go to the post. Now, an important thing to point out about this email is that that it's really specific to the type of content on that post. It's not a generic signup. A lot of people, Pinch of Yum included, have these really generic signups for getting all the recipes sent to your inbox. And as Matt talked about in his podcast interview, it's not going to be the exact fit. It's not going to help solve a problem for people that's really specific. So what we're trying to do here is connect the bucket of content to a problem and then helping people solve that problem and when appropriate, talking about something that might help solve that problem, but is also related to one of the products we have, which you can see how we did in that email that I just read. So that's the other way that we're thinking about being strategic with the content creation process is we want to continue the conversation to help people solve a problem, but to continue the conversation. And we're doing that. One of the ways that we're doing that is through email. So the nice thing, the incredible thing about this is that all of these little things compound over time. Laying the foundation, making sure that it's really solid, using a tool like Ahrefs, and making sure that when you are creating content that is content that is optimized and really solid, making sure that the content that you're creating is well researched. And so using keyword research and making sure that it's not super, super specific. Right. With low search volume, but also not so generic that it's really competitive. And you can use a tool like SEO Market or Ahrefs to get a better understanding of that. You can use it more as a brainstorming tool. It's not complete science. There's a little bit of an art to it, and they're not 100% accurate, but they're more of a guide that can point you in a certain direction. Once we have an idea of what that content is, we're going to start and we're already doing this remarketing and retargeting using tools like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, and we're thinking about adding in Pinterest and YouTube potentially. After that, we're thinking about what are the ways that we can build out a series for people to sign up and to be a part of and so we can dive a little bit deeper with them. We have one email done with that, we're working on the other ones. It takes a lot of time. But the great thing about all of this is once you layer it in, it's going to exist forever. So you can build on top of that. And the more traffic you get, the more these multipliers, these variables have an impact. Because even if it, the only difference it makes is, you know, 1.05% difference, that is a multiplier to your work. It is making a difference, it is having an impact. And that means the more traffic you get, the more impact that that variable can have. These things like the remarketing, these things like the email series that you build and really specific opt ins for that content. So as I talked about at the beginning of this episode, we're in the early stages for this. WPTacey is at a place where it's very early in the content marketing process and that's why this is an important project for us. We know the significance of content marketing and how important that is. And so we're starting to place a lot of focus on this as we build this out. My encouragement to you would be to think about what are the projects that you could be doing that you could focus in on. And it might be related to this. It might be something that similar to this, where you want to start creating these strategic buckets and then thinking about how you are interacting with and the relationship that you have with people that land in those certain buckets and being strategic with that. So like I said at the beginning of this podcast, we are doing this little series. It's called Projects. The hope for this is to talk about the projects that we're doing to give you a little inside look what's happening behind the scenes for the different businesses we have at the different levels that we're doing them right. Not every business has been around for 9 years like pinch of yum has. Wptasty is an earlier stage business. It has some traction. It's a proven business model. We're excited about it and that's why we're doubling down and continuing to build on that success and focusing in on some of these other areas like content marketing. If you ever have any interest in going deeper yourself with any of this stuff, Food Blogger Pro would be a great place for you to do that. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com and sign up for the waiting list to become a member there. If you're not a food blogger, there's no worries about that. We have a lot of people who actually aren't bloggers, food bloggers, they're just content creators in different niches, but they have found that they can apply the general practices that we talk about within Food Blogger Pro to what they're doing as well. And if nothing else, be sure to follow along on the podcast and you can subscribe in your podcast player of choice, whether that be Spotify, whether that be the podcast app on Apple, or any of the other places where podcasts are available. If you have a podcast app that you love and it's not available, let us know and we'll try and get our podcast feed available there as well so you can listen in your place of choice. Thanks so much for tuning in and thanks so much for being a listener and we will catch you guys around. We'll be back here same time, same place next week. Until then, make it a great week. Sa.