249: Team Check-In - Redesigning a Membership Site, Fulfilling a Need in the Market, and Step-by-Step Recipe Videos

Hello, wonderful listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa and I'm the general manager of Food Blogger Pro, and I'm coming to you from a sunny and delightfully crisp day here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We are just so happy that you have decided to tune into the podcast this week. Today's episode is actually a little bit different. Some of our more recent episodes, and in fact, it's kind of like a piece of content that we actually publish at the beginning of each month for our Food Blogger Pro members, called a Happening Now. In these videos, people from the team, whether that be the Food Blogger Pro team or the teams from one of our other brands like Pinch of Yum, WP Tasty, or nutrifox, they talk about what's, for lack of a better term, happening now. We'll talk about a new tool we're using or a new process we're implementing, maybe some new projects we're working on, or maybe it's just. Just a new insight we're excited to share with our members. So, like I mentioned, we publish those every month, and they're just a good reminder for us to check in with the community and chat about what's working and what's not during that specific time. And it's just a great way for our members to be totally in the loop with what we're up to. So today we're actually giving you a sneak peek of what Happening now video may sound like. I'll talk about an exciting update we made just last week to Food Blogger Pro. Bjork then talks about a new project he's been working on. And then Bjork interviews Katie, who's actually the general manager of our sister brand for WordPress plugins, wptasty, about an update that's now live with our recipe plugin, Tasty Recipes. So this is gonna be a pretty cool episode. So sit tight and enjoy this little sneak peek behind the scenes. Oh, hey, me again. So let's talk about this update to Food Blogger Pro. So for those who don't know food blogger pro, that is, if you go to foodbloggerpro.com is our membership site for food bloggers. So if you're a food blogger and you become a member, you instantly get access to a community forum, instructional videos, deals on blogging tools, these Happening now videos, and monthly live Q&As and more. And just last week, actually, we launched a redesigned Food Blogger Pro website, complete with a few new features that we're excited to tell you about today. So Why a redesign? Well, we we haven't redesigned the site in quite a while. And by a while, I mean at least in five years, maybe even more. And Food Blocker Pro has just had three designs, I'm pretty sure including this one, since its start back in 2013. But our brand has evolved in these past few years, so our design needed to evolve with it. And this redesign is also just a really great way for us to reinvest back into the business and make it more useful and more valuable for our members, which is always our number one concern. So in addition to some color and font and minimal design changes, we actually made a few functionality changes that really kind of like exemplify that more useful and valuable goal we always have, most notably with our courses. So you may not know this, but I was actually a Food Blogger Pro member before I joined the team four years ago this month and I joined for our courses or for our videos. I wanted someone showing me how to take awesome food photos, how to set up my blog, and how to use the best plugins. And you know, this area has always been a favorite for our members too, but we've gotten some feedback about it in the past. Before this redesign, each page just had a big lesson video, a full transcript beneath some resources, and a button to the next video in the course. But as we all know, food bloggers are busy. We're always multitasking, so some of our members wondered if there was an easier and quicker way that they could get through our content. So now with the redesign website, members can see every lesson in the course as they're watching a video on the right side of the screen so they know what's coming up and how many more videos there are in the course. They can enable Autoplay so lessons can easily flow from one to the other, allowing members to do laundry or do dishes or shoot a recipe, as well as learn from Food Blogger Pro at the same time. And Autoplay also auto completes lessons and automatically keeps track of your progress in our course tracker. You can actually see a sneak peek of this new course page@foodbloggerpro.com 249 that's the URL for the show notes for this episode. But with this redesign, we didn't change a ton, but what we have changed really does make a difference. And I think that's an important point if you're looking to redesign your site. It doesn't need to look drastically different and have amazing million different new features, but the changes you make should have a positive impact and a big difference for your users or readers. Of course. This redesign is live right now. It feels so good for it to be live. We're so excited. So members, you can go check out what's new right now. I definitely recommend playing around with our new course and lesson pages. It is so awesome. It's so cool to see. And if you're not already a member, you can still check out our new public facing pages at Facebook. Food blogger pro.com so that's all about the redesign. We hope you love it. We would love any feedback. If you have it, you can send it to me personally. Alexaoodbloggerpro.com but next we're going to talk to Bjork. He has an exciting update about a new project he's been working on. You guys got a little bit of a sneak peek if you have been a podcast episode listener for a while now, but he has an update right now and he's going to share it with you today.

Hello hello, hello friends. I hope you're doing well wherever you are right now because it is such a unique time in the world and I feel like it needs to be acknowledged anytime that we are checking in that it is just such a unique time and also hope that you are doing well in whatever this season may bring for you and your family and the norms that you once had and the new norms that you're starting to form. I know that is true for us. We're starting to figure out these new norms, but continuing to move forward and figuring out how, bit by bit, little by little, we can continue to push projects forward. And that's actually one of the things that I'm going to be talking about today. In my little section here of today's podcast, I'm going to be talking about one of the projects that we've been working on. I mentioned it a few months back on a podcast episode. I don't think I mentioned it by name, but we officially have a name for it now. But before I reveal what that is, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we approach new endeavors like this. And the reason that I'm going to talk about that is because I hope that it informs some of the projects, whether for internally for your blog, or maybe something new that you're working on and how you approach those. So through the years we've launched a lot of different things. Some have had success and some haven't. A few that you may be familiar with. Food Blogger Pro is one of them that came out of Pinch of Yum and we were publishing content to Pinch of Yum about blogging. And we started to see that there's a recurring pattern of other people who are doing similar things and a need for education and a community around that. So we launched Food Blogger Pro back in 2013. We started working on it in 2012, launched it in 2013 as a place for us to have conversations and to teach and to also learn all about building a food and recipe business online. After that we started to realize, hey, you know, there's a lot of people working on these sites and they're wanting to include some contextual nutrition information around what they're doing, ourselves included. And it was really hard to go through the process of calculating that. You had to go in and choose dropdowns if you were going to use a tool. So you'd have to select like 0 through 30. If it was like two eggs, so you'd select two and then you'd have to search for eggs and you'd have to do that ingredient by ingredient in order to get nutrition information for a recipe. If you had a bunch of ingredients, it would take a really long time. So we started to brainstorm and think about is there a way that we can build a tool that does this easier, that that makes it quicker? So we created nutrifox out of that. And then eventually what started happening is we started to work on our own plugins. So for those of you who use WordPress, you know that WordPress, one of the common things that you'll do in WordPress is add a plugin and plugins. For those who aren't familiar with WordPress, I kind of describe it as aftermarket parts for a WordPress site. So if you have a car and you want to install rims or like a muffler, I don't. Not that people are installing after park aftermarket mufflers or rims much these days. Maybe people are and I just not my friend group that people are doing that. But that idea of you have a stock car, a default car that you buy, and then you add these aftermarket parts, that's what plugins are for. WordPress. As many of you know, we were creating a lot of those aftermarket parts for Pinch of Yum Recipe plugin. We started to figure out different things we wanted to do for Pinterest to optimize for traffic from Pinterest. So we created tasty recipes. We realized there was a need for certain ways to internally link, so we created tasty links and made it easier to build in Affiliate links and affiliate content. So that's what Tasty Links is all about. So WP Tasty really came out of our need to create our own plugins and then realizing that other people could use those as well. And we're continuing and want to continue to do that. We want to keep our ear to the ground, to listen to what, what the shifts in the market are or even reflect internally, to say, what are the things that we need and is there potential for other people to also need this? And the reason that I kind of do that, quick recap of the businesses that we've created. And I left out the businesses that we worked on that didn't end up happening, because there's a long list of those. But I feel like it's important to acknowledge that all of these aren't successful. There's a really good chance that we create things that we realize aren't our vision of what we wanted them to be, or that the market didn't actually need them. So know that those exist for us as well. But the list would be too long to recap that. But we do have these tools that we've built that, that we've realized, hey, other people need these, we need these. We're going to use them internally, and other people could use them as well. And we've been thinking a lot about that as it relates to a tool to organize and understand and optimize the content on your website. And so we've been working. There's two people here in Minnesota. There's a UI UX designer that I've been working with, and then also a developer, we've been working on a tool that we're calling Clarity, and it's Clarity with an I, not a Y at the end because there's about a $990,000 difference in the domain names if it included an I versus just a Y. And Clarity for us is the tool that we were working on to help us organize, understand and optimize our WordPress content. And we're gonna focus first on Pinch of Yum. But the great thing is we can also do that for Food Blogger Pro and for wptasty. So we've been working on this tool, and more than anything, it's in the really, really early stages. So it's a basic tool, but it's starting to come to life and it's starting to offer and give us insight and feedback on ways that we can be improving our content. Right now, it's really just a sorting and organization tool. But we would love to expand and build on that. And the reason for that, the premise for it is that we are moving into a time where people, publishers are thinking about their content not just as new content that they need to publish and do keyword research against and try and rank for a new piece of content. But you've heard us talk a lot about making sure that you are treating your old content really well and understanding that. And I think that for a lot of us, we don't have a good understanding of what our old content looks like. So Clarity is a way to get clarity on what that old content looks like, to get an idea of how you can craft that old content and what you should be focusing on and how those improvements are made over time. Now, for those of you who will start to use this early version, it'll be the basic version. But the reason is we didn't want to get too far down the line without starting to talk to other people and to get feedback and to get custom. The idea is customer development. So like, what does the customer that's going to be using this actually need and want? Now we have a little bit of unique scenario where we will be a customer of Clarity, and so our own thoughts and ideas will shape that a little bit. But we will be one out of hopefully thousands of people that will be using Clarity. And our insights aren't necessarily more important than other people. So we want to get to the point where we're starting to get ideas and feedback from other people who are using it. Now, I mentioned this a few months ago on the podcast and some people wrote in and said they would be interested in being early users. And for those of you who did know that you are on the list, I actually have a little folder in my Gmail and that is sort ordered from for people who have followed up and said that they're interested. So I will be following up with those people first and foremost. But if you are interested in being a user of Clarity, we would love to hear from you. You can drop me an email bjorkoodbloggerpro.com and you can just say I'm interested. I will tag that email. And then as we start to get to the point where we can start to invite other people to use this, I'll slowly but surely start to reach out to those people. And it'll probably be almost like a consultation, both you consulting me and me consulting you on how you can use the tool. And the hope is that we can start to learn about your ideas that you might have and we can also teach you some of the ideas that we have in terms of how we're approaching this and using it to improve our content over a long period of time and to look not just at new content, but also old content and how we can approach that. So the point of this little section for me is kind of twofold. It's to give you an update on clarity, what it is, how it works, and what our mindset is with it. And number two, hopefully it provides a little inspiration for you around ways that you can continue to think through what other people might need. And you're probably not going to be building a software tool for publishers, but there's a really good chance that you will be building something for a customer, for your audience, for your readers, whoever it might be. And the goal is to understand what it is that they need. And that's always been what we've tried to do. And with Clarity, it's going to be the same thing. We're going to try and understand what people need and do our best job to deliver something that helps them with that need. So as you think about building your business, think about the things that you can be doing. It's not just about publishing posts, it's not just about traffic. It's about understanding what people need and how you can create something, whether that be a product or content, that helps them solve that need. So this is a shorter little solo section for me, but that's the update on Clarity, some of the things that we've been working on, and I'm excited to start to have some of those conversations with you who might be interested in this. And again, if you are, you can just drop me an email. Bjorkoodbloggerpro.com, say, I'm interested. If you go to Clarity again, Clarity with an I, it ends with an I, not a Y. You won't see anything unless you're listening to this podcast a little bit later. We're actually working on what we call the marketing pages for that this week, which means that, you know, the homepage, the signup page, things like that. We'll have a waiting list in the early stages because we won't be at the point where we can have a lot of people come in and start to use it. But little by little, we'll start to trickle that out, and we'll start by emails, and then eventually we'll switch that over to an official waiting list. So that's the update again. Hope you're doing well wherever you are. And in this unique season, I hope that you can find unique ways to be appreciative of small things, despite the reality of this being a really difficult time. So we appreciate you, we appreciate this audience and are grateful that we can show up and do this every single day. Thanks, Katie. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi. Thanks for having me today.

Yeah. On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you to have your audio voice recorded and forever published to the Internet, never to be changed again?

Probably a two.

That's one of the small print things that maybe you didn't catch when you were brought on board. It's really small at the bottom. We said we will occasionally be bringing you on to the podcast, recording your voice, doing it in one take, publishing it to the Internet and thousands of people will be able to listen to it. So sorry if you missed that, but here we are. Katie, thanks for, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks for talking a little bit about some of the stuff that you've been up to at wptasty and specifically with tasty recipes. A long time ago on the podcast we did this thing called a Tasty Tip and it was technically sponsored by WP Tasty. We kind of moved away from that, but this is kind of a version of that where we are going to do a short little snippet and talk about some of the things that are important for people to know that are happening in the food publishing world in general, but also as it relates to tasty recipes. And you are really close to everything that's happening there because you are the general manager for WP Tasty. So a lot of WPTacey users have maybe connected with you or seen you write a blog post, know that you are working on that project, but can, for those who aren't familiar, can you give a quick recap and overview of what it is that you do with your position and some of the things that you work on at wptasty?

Yeah, absolutely. So kind of on a day to day, a lot of what I do is help out the support team and help out with any of the kind of trickier situations or problems that come up with support. In addition to Ann and Amber, which are the all stars. Yes. The absolute front line of the support team. In addition to that, I kind of do a lot of planning and product feature releases and do a lot of googling and researching and figuring out like what improvements need to be made to the WP Tasty products.

Yeah, for sure. And one of those, a really big one that we released recently, pushed out, was tasty for Tasty Recipes. So if you have a food blog, this is the recipe plugin that we use on Pinch of Yum. A lot of, a lot of other food bloggers use this and a lot of bloggers you've probably heard of. If you go to wptasty.com tasty recipes, you can see some of those people read some of the testimonials. There's some great testimonials that we have. And I will, I'll do as little as I can and also as much as I can to continually shamelessly plug tasty recipes and WP tasting all the good work that you guys do. But one of the things that we want to talk about today is the release the version number 2.6.0 for tasty recipes because it has a really important feature that we've been talking about a little bit on the podcast. You know, we mentioned it with Britta in the, the podcast episode that we did with her, Brit Nell about repurposing video. We've talked about kind of if you listen really closely to the podcast, you've heard us mention it as something that we're experimenting with Pinch of Yum. But it's these step by step videos that we're starting to do. You can see some examples. We'll link to it in the show notes. If you haven't seen other people do that or a Pinch of Yum do that. But Katie, can you talk about essentially what this is like if you were to explain if somebody's it's hard on a podcast because we're just talking and trying to describe something that is created to be visual, but talk people through what a step by step video or also part of this release is images. So step by step video or images, how that works within a recipe card, what it looks like and maybe why it's valuable.

Yeah, absolutely. So late last year, the Pinch of Yum team had this idea especially. I mean, Lindsay was really kind of the mastermind behind this, but she wanted to start adding some additional instructional pieces to the recipes. And we started experimenting with different ways to add these videos. And for the first couple months they were hard coded into the blog post and it was kind of tedious. And we experimented with different video platforms, Vimeo, YouTube. So we really kind of used that experience to kind of iron out a lot of the wrinkles and kind of landed on adding these videos right into the recipe cards so that as you read each step you had a also the visual video snippet piece to go along with each step within the recipe card.

Yeah. And one of the things that is great about that, I love to geek out on this concept and think about the evolution of the web web. And if we scroll way back, it was literally like text and hyperlinks, you know, so we just call them links now. But like that's what the web was. It was like a bunch of text and then it was linked links to other text. And then eventually the Internet got fast enough and there was the capability to start adding images. And this was like, oh great. Like, not only can we have text, but we can have images. And now video becoming more prevalent. So it's like, oh, you can do a YouTube embed, you can do a Vimeo embed, you can explain things a little bit further. And now there's this like kind of micro evolution. And this has been, you've been able to do this for a long time, but you're now seeing it a little bit more, which is like, what is it, what is it called when you. This is me showing my lack of knowledge as it relates to anything recipe related when talking about technology. Oh, deconstruct, it's like deconstructed video. It's like a, it's like when you're doing a deconstructing a sauce, it's like deconstructing video. So, and Britta talks about this in her episode, like, how do you repurpose video? So this micro evolution of. It's not just one video, but it's step by step videos. So as people are going through, they can see like, okay, at this specific step, this is what it looks like to, you know, if it's vegetarian, the vegetarian chili recipe. Like this is what it looks like to add this certain ingredient at this point or to, to mix it in or to fold it in or whatever it might be. And so you can kind of break those little pieces out. One of the things that is interesting about that, and you said this is like it's different than a video that you click and play. So it's not like somebody's hovering over it and they're clicking the play button. Can you talk at a high level about how that works? Like even within the back end of Tasty Recipes, how do you go about uploading a video that's actually just a single step in the process? What does that look like?

Yeah, this is a really different video experience than probably what a lot of bloggers are used to producing. So these are very short clips, I think typically around 30 seconds. And basically they're super easy to edit. Because there's typically no music, no copy, no nothing. It's just little shots of these video segments. So for us we upload them all to Vimeo because it's just, it's a cleaner experience in that there's no ads, there's no suggested content and we're able to maintain a lot of controls. So once we upload the videos, we make a little folder for each recipe and we hide them from public search too because they're really out of context, they don't provide a lot of value. So they're up there. And then for each embed we have the option, we actually added this to the recipe cards. But you can also do this manually if you decide to do this without a recipe card. They're looping, they're muted and they're up autoplay so they almost appear like gifs, but they load much faster and are easier, easier to interact with.

And for some people they might think, well, wouldn't you just upload that right to WordPress like you would an image. But video is so different in that the back end infrastructure that it takes to have a video load really quickly and play and then also the bandwidth that's required to play those is kind of, it's a different ballgame than images. And there's been a couple different things that we've experimented with in the past and it, with playing video and like hosting it ourselves on AWS or you know, different hosting platforms. And it's like, wow, that gets expensive really quickly. And so it's nice to have a platform like Vimeo that does video really well hosting those videos, but then using tasty recipes to kind of facilitate that. So one of the things that I, that I love about the experience, like you said, is it's really clean. And the other thing that I love about it is this gives people the opportunity who want to start including video to record video and to not have to really understand how to edit. So you could record a 10 second video of a step along the way and you could use your phone for that. And you could use this as a step by step video start to include that extra level of media that is more helpful and explains things a little bit better without having to dive super deep on that. And the other great thing about this update is you actually also worked with Emily on the Pinch of Yum team who does all of the video and put together kind of an explainer, a how to a step by step video editing post on WP Tasty. So can you talk a little bit about High level. What some of the takeaways were in that conversation with Emily in regards to how to approach step by step video if you want to start including those in your recipe.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even back in October, November, that was definitely a point of conversation is how hard are these videos going to be to produce for all these recipes? And we really weren't sure. But once Emily got a system down where basically as she's shooting those longer form videos that we're all more used to seeing, that will be like your main YouTube or recipe video, she just does a little extra planning and is basically able to pretty effortlessly put these step by step videos together. But it is, it's just about like writing out that recipe, making those steps and making sure you get those overhead shots and just keeping in mind that like, the purpose of these really is instructional. So you don't have to feel a lot of pressure for them to be perfect or super shiny.

You can line up with the music. There is no music. Like you don't have to worry about them. You don't have to know how to speed a video up so it goes faster. It's like, yes, doing a FaceTime with a friend and being like, here's this step and here's how to do it.

Exactly. And I've also heard that a lot of people are learning how to repurpose certain steps. Like if they're hosting a, like a baking blog, there's a lot of steps that they'll use again and again for other recipes.

Oh, great. So you can reuse it. That's awesome.

Yeah.

Last thing that I want to talk about. And as a note, we'll link to that in the show notes as well so people can check that out. Otherwise you can go to wptasty.com and if you hover over learn and then go to Plugin Update, you can see a lot of this information that we're talking about recapped in that Plugin Updates post. Last thing that I want to talk about is this thing called structured data. So how does structured data play into all of this? And can you just do a recap of what structured data is for those of us who have heard it, we kind of are sort of familiar with it. But why is it important? What is it? And then how does that play into the images or the videos in the instructional steps?

Yeah, structured data is probably a big old chunk of my life at Tasty Recipes. So basically tasty recipes, just big picture. The whole purpose is to add structured data to your recipes, which is Basically letting Google and other search engines know exactly what's on the page and how to render it in search results. So part of doing both the video support and adding the image support for the instructions was also including the structured data markup for those pieces as well. So if you do a Google Structured Data, if you use the testing tool that they provide, you'll be able to see how Google breaks up your recipe and all that information for the Internet to read.

Yeah.

Does that answer your question?

It does. It's a great tool. And for those who haven't used it before, you can Google, it's Google Inception. Because you could also say Google Quote, Google Structured Data Tool or Google Structured Data Test, one of those. It should get you to the point where you can literally take a URL from your blog, a recipe, and you can go in and you put that URL in the test tool. And what it spits back is like, hey, we're gonna tell you what we see you telling us, like what you're communicating to us, what this post is about. And if you have a recipe post, it should tell Google, this is a recipe baseline number one. But then above and beyond that, there's all this additional stuff that you can tell it, like, here's the rating, here's the image we would recommend that you use. Here are the instructions, here are the steps. And what you're saying is also within this, we're saying here the video steps connected to it or the image steps connected to it. So it's all of this contextual information, some of which we see right away in a search result. You can, you can look at it and see it's in a recipe card, it's in a search result, the image, the ratings. But some of it we're telling Google and it's maybe not using it yet, but it's still good information for it to have. It's not, there's not any disadvantage with over communicating because there probably will be a time or potentially will be a time where Google will say, hey, we're going to actually now use this. And if you've all along been including that information, all the better because then Google's gonna understand it better, display it better. And the idea is there will be more contextual information around that and it will increase clicks. So we'll link to that in the show notes as well. I feel like we could do an entire. This is supposed to be like a little short snippet and I'm trying to like keep it at a snippet. So I Will. I will. I will wrap the Tasty Tip section here, but I know that people will be interested in learning in following along. We have the WP Tasty blog. We have the resources you mentioned. People might have questions, Katie. How do they reach out, connect with you? Follow along with the things that are happening over at wptasty.

Yeah, absolutely. You're always welcome to click on the little conversation bubble in the bottom right hand side of the page if you're ever on the WP Tasty site. But you can also email any of us. You can find all of our emails on the about page and we're always happy to help you get any of this set up.

Awesome. And want to give a shout out to the wptasty team. We talked about Ann and Amber who do such a great job frontline support and Daniel who does incredible development. Jasmine who helps with some of the affiliate. If any of you are WP Tasty users and want to promote that, you can connect with Jasmine. We just have a great team there and you are a huge part of that. So Katie, thanks for coming on, talking a little bit about what's happening over at wptasty and for leading the charge over there. Really appreciate it. It.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

And that's a wrap for this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast today. It means a lot that you're here and that you're part of the Food Blogger Pro community. So much of what we do, as you know Food Bloggers is based on community. So it's really cool that you're a part of this little podcast little group. Just feels awesome. So thank you so much for being here today. If you have any questions about anything that we talked about in today's episode, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com 249 and you can leave a comment there on the podcast Show Notes. We'd love to help you out. And if you're interested in getting access to some of these monthly check ins like I mentioned, the Happening now videos as well as some of the other Food Blogger Pro benefits that come with being a member, you can learn more about Food Blogger pro membership@foodbloggerpro.com otherwise we'll see you next time. We'll be here next week, next Tuesday and until then, make it a great week.