278: Lessons from a Veteran Food Blogger - How to Overcome a 60% Dip in Traffic with Carrie Forrest

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Hello. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Alexa and I'm part of the Food Blogger Pro team. And we are all just so happy and excited that you decided to tune into the episode today. So today is kind of a continuation of our series of revisiting some bloggers that we interviewed in the past. And today we are interviewing Carrie Forrest from Clean Eating Kitchen, and we're going to be talking to her about a lot of things. She's been blogging for over 10 years, so she has built up quite the reserve of knowledge when it comes to building and growing a food blog. But as you probably know, not all content on a food blog performs equally as the result of an SEO audit. After she experienced a large dip in traffic, Carrie actually decided to refresh and delete, nearly, wait for it, two thirds of the content on her site. And through that process of learning about the health of her site as a whole, Carrie now understands how her content performs and how her content supports the mission of her blog. It's a really fun episode. We're really excited to talk to her again. So without any further ado, Bjork. Take it away.

Carrie. Welcome back to the podcast.

Hi, Bjork. I am so excited to be back.

Yeah, we've been doing a few catch up episodes, talking to people who have been on the podcast before, revisiting those, those stories and kind of catching people up over what's been happening over the past few years. We had an interview back in, I think it was 2018, where you shared some things that you were learning. I think we titled it six Mistakes to Talk through. And it's helpful to hear about not only the things that are going really well and we're going to talk about some of those things today and did on that podcast, but also, hey, here's some of the things that I learned. So that's a great episode that I would encourage people to go back and check out. But we're going to do some catch up today. But before we get to that point, can you let people know you know your story? You've been at this for a while. We've been connected both through Food Blogger Pro and, you know, random emails here and there for a while. But for those who aren't familiar with you and what you do, what's your background and what's your story with your blog?

Yes, thank you. And I'm, I, as I mentioned, I'm so excited to be back. When I was on the podcast the first time I got so many great emails and people connecting with me. And I just loved that so much because I think most of us bloggers feel like often we feel disconnected from the community. And so to have the chance to connect with other bloggers and almost like on a one, on one basis, people always find something to connect to and then to have those emails and make new friendships, it just feels really good.

Yes. Isn't it, isn't it true that part of the, part of what we have to figure out as creators is how to sustainably do the thing we're doing? And part of that isn't the tactics, it's not the tips, it's not the tricks. It's like relationships with people who get what we're doing or friendships in, you know, or acquaintances who of people who also have a blog. It's such an important piece of the puzzle. And I'm glad that you said that because I resonate with that and I think it's worth pointing out.

Yeah, it's almost like the best part of the, of the job, of the career. And I think we're going to talk about. I've had some real ups and downs these last few years and I mean even just I had an incident where it was silly and I can tell you about it. It's almost laughable when I share this story.

Let's do it.

Okay. And just to let everybody know, my blog is called Clean Eating Kitchen and I have been blogging since 2009 and so my blog has had a few names, but that's my name and I'm sticking with it.

Great.

Clean Eating Kitchen Calm. And I'm Clean Eating Carrie on Instagram if anyone wants to connect with me there. But so I do have like, I've had a health journey. I had some ups and downs with my health too. So I blog gluten free and dairy free recipes and I just, I really focus on making it easy and quick. So that's kind of my blogging story. And then what happened recently is it was summertime, it was really hot and I had heard about making frozen grapes. Okay. Making frozen grapes means putting grapes in the freezer. Granted. Okay, that's not really a complicated recipe. But I don't know, I had never heard about doing that. I think my sister told me about it.

Sure.

I wrote a blog post with a recipe, with a recipe card, how to make frozen grapes. And then I posted it in some Facebook groups and for some reason, I don't know, okay, 2020, let's just agree, has been very intense. There's a lot of intense emotions happening. So for some reason, people were offended. And I'm talking. I'm not talking about other bloggers. I'm talking about, like, the general public. And it just, like this post took off on. It almost went viral on Facebook, but not in a good way. It was like people were writing, did the Internet just tell me how to freeze grapes? And I mean, it was insane. And somebody left a rude comment on my blog, like, actually left, like a comment, you know, and maybe in a less intense time, I wouldn't have been frustrated, but I was just like, oh, it's so hard.

It's so hard to process through that stuff. Yes, totally.

Yeah. And I've had a lot meaner things sent to me. But first, and this, of course, this wasn't, you know, like a big deal, but I don't know, I was just a bad day. And so I reached out to the blogging community and just said, I am having a really bad day. And I got. So there were literally maybe 20, 30 people reaching out, reaching out and saying, you know, been there. It's hard. You just have to let it go. It's more about them. It's not about you. And. And then a lot of people even left comments on my blog. Wow. I didn't know how to freeze grapes. Thanks for sharing.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Point being, it's less about the. The thing. And the thing could be many different variations of that that for whatever reason, cause people to get frustrated or angry or la. But you have this in some ways, kind of safety net of people who can relate. And I think what I hear you saying is that that doesn't necessarily naturally exist for us in this world, because naturally, what we're doing is it's. We're solopreneurs, or maybe we have a small team of people that we work with, and we are kind of siloed in the work that we're doing. And it's different than if you were, you know, had a restaurant and you had 10 employees who were also helping to make the meals and working the front desk. And it's like, then if you have a rude customer, which inevitably you'll have, you kind of have this group that absorbs it, even if it's directed at one person. But as creators online, a lot of times we don't have that. And especially in a year that is a really difficult year in many different ways, to be able to have that community is so important. And I think even my guess is even just in you sharing that story, there will be people who will benefit from knowing that they're not alone in that. That's a common thing that people feel. Yes.

It made it so much better just to express how I was feeling. And yeah. To have other bloggers know what that was like and to say, come on, you can get through this. It's okay. We've been there, you know, keep doing what you're doing.

Yes, that's awesome. And love that story that you share. And I know that people will appreciate it as well. So let's. You'd said, hey, it's kind of been some ups and downs over the past few years since we last checked in. And I think the truth is that exists for everybody, anybody we've ever interviewed. It would exist for me if somebody interviewed me, but not everybody's willing to share that stuff, which I think is so great that you say, hey, there's been ups, it's been downs. But let's talk about. Well, my philosophy is usually starting with the things that are less positive or harder or the downs and then transitioning to some of the positives. So would you be okay with that in terms of kind of an order to go through things?

Yeah, sure.

Great. So one of the things you had talked about was this big Google Update and the impact that that had on your site. Can you talk about when that happened and then share a little bit from your understanding of Google Updates, how they work and how they can impact sites?

Yeah. So I'll just go back and say when we last talked in, I think it was early 2018, may have even been before that. But I was not super into keyword research. But that and SEO type stuff, it was kind of just a concept I was not that familiar with. But then I really started getting into it. So I was starting to keyword research all my recipes, and then I maybe started putting more keywords into my blog post. So if I was writing about chocolate muffins, I would be sure to use that keyword and maybe use different iterations in it. And it started to feel very empowering because I did start getting a lot more search traffic from Google. And so a lot of us, we all know that, you know, it's been like Pinterest traffic has been up and down, you know, Instagram. Who knows if you get. If what kind of traffic you're going to get from Instagram? So a lot of us really rely on Google search traffic. And it was so empowering. So I would say starting around, you know, it was really early 2019, I really, I could see my search traffic going up, you know, then I finally hit 100,000 monthly page views. I mean that, that took me a long time to reach that point. I was starting to get a nice monthly ad income. So 2019 was really the first year where I was seeing everything start to come together. And also something really fun happened was I randomly got an email from a book agent who said, would you be interested in writing an instant pot book? You know, no brainer. Yes. And that ended up working out. I ended up writing an instant pot authorized cookbook, which was great because I had support from the company and of course instant pot has been hot. So I ended up writing two books for this publisher. In 2019, my blog traffic was, I think I end, my height was maybe 300, around 350, 50,000 page views. And then I think it was September 2019 and then again in November. It wasn't really till November 2019 when I started to see a huge drop off from Google and realizing that it had been a core update and that my site had been hit. And when I say hit, I mean overnight. Well, it, you know, really, maybe it wasn't overnight, but to me it felt overnight. But pretty much November 10, 2019, my traffic was 2/3 gone. So.

And then it's a, I'm sure it's a date and a time that you remember. So there's a lot to unpack there and a lot of different pieces that I would love to dig into. The first is this idea of a core update. Can you talk about for those who aren't familiar with how that works and what the rhythms of that are, what a core update is?

Okay, well this is my understanding that Google, I guess constantly makes shifts to its algorithm, which is how your blog appears in the search results and how everybody else's blog or website is kind of shifted around, whether you're on the first page, whether you're on the second page. So that can happen daily day to day. But then maybe every three to four months Google, I guess presses go on some kind of a bigger change. And so maybe they're making, they're instituting some bigger change to how they're organizing their search results. That's my understanding. And so apparently November 9, 2019, there was one. I mean they happen again like several times a year. But in looking back on it from my research and things I've webinars and things I've listened to, this November 2019 core update had to do or it penalized websites that perhaps had been over optimized so all that, all those keywords that I had put in and not that that's a bad thing to put your keywords into a blog post, but I had done some other things that I thought was correct. For instance, I had used my headings incorrectly.

Can you talk about what some of those are? Cause I'm sure when you say that, a lot of people will be like, oh, what, what is that? And my guess is when you say in using your headings, like, were you putting a keyword in a lot of the headings as opposed to naturally just saying, like, here's how to make this recipe. It's like, here's how to make this chocolate chip cookie recipe. And doing that in multiple different instances or what were the different things that, that you changed that you were doing before that you're no longer doing?

Yeah, so that was, that was a big one. So maybe having an H2 heading throughout the blog post that said banana, chocolate banana recipe, chocolate banana ingredients, other chocolate banana recipes. And whereas now. So I did end up doing a full SEO audit with Casey for media wise, who's the, I think he's the food blogger pro SEO expert. Right. So yeah. So that a lot, some of this stuff I've learned from him. But now my blog post is much more natural. So I do still use headings because headings are great for, they help break up your blog post. They make it easier for the reader to flow through and find what they're looking for. But they, they already know that it's a chocolate banana muffin recipe from the title. They don't need to see it like, you know the post.

Yes. Yeah. And the point being that when you, when you're writing your content, you want to write it in a way where you're writing in a technically SEO sound way. So you're, so you're taking into consideration things that are important for an SEO perspective, but also writing for humans first. And that's what I hear you saying is making that change or kind of shifting a little bit to have that focus on the person who's reading the article and making sure that like if you put it in front of somebody, it wouldn't seem robotic or mechanical for them to continually read like chocolate chip cookie recipe or whatever the recipe would be over and over and over in the titles, but instead saying, hey, this is a section on frequently asked questions. It's not Frequently Asked questions about chocolate chip cookie recipe. Were there other things that you shifted or changed after this update and whether that be advice that Casey had gave in the audit or insight that you got from doing additional research. Anything else that would be worth pointing out that would be good considerations for other creators?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I have pretty much been working on the technical SEO part of my website for the better part of nine months now, and I have done a huge amount of changes. So because I had been blogging so long, I had a lot of posts. I think I had over a thousand posts, and a lot of them were worthless. And the reason I can say that is because you can go into your Google search console and you can pull a report for the last three months of your search results. You can sort by your clicks. I think that's how they say it. And you can sort by like zero, you know, small to large. You can see that I had hundreds of posts that have had no clicks from search traffic. So in essence, that means Google is. They're not. I mean, they're nowhere near the front page on Google. Nobody's clicking on them. And maybe they're useful to me from a personal perspective. Pictures of a vacation five years ago. But I did end up deleting about 2/3 of my content.

That's. It's an interesting tactic I've heard a lot of people talk about, and I think it's worth pointing out. And also kind of a scary one for people to think about. Like, hey, it feels like, you know, you have this work that you've done, you have this valuable. Like, content is viewed as a form of value, but when you looked at it, it's like, maybe it isn't valuable. Just because I did it doesn't mean that it's something that I should keep. Right? It's kind of maybe similar to a photograph. Just because you take 100 photographs doesn't mean that you publish all of those photographs with a blog post. Just because you have a thousand blog posts doesn't mean that every one of those should be kept. So what did that experience look like? And was it scary for you to delete 2/3 of your content?

I think it felt good. And there was a mind shift maybe. I think over the last few years, my view about my blog has really shifted. And I wish it had. I wish it had happened earlier, where I now look at my blog less of my personal journal and my personal journey, but more of a resource for my readers. And so the way I look at my blog now is every piece of content on my blog needs to earn its keep. And the reason the way it earns its keep is that it's It's I go, I'm reshooting old photos, I'm going through and making sure the links are valid. They're not going to broken pages. I'm linking to reputable sources because I do have health articles on my site. So I'm making sure I'm linking to, you know, government authorized, authorized sites, not questionable sources. And so it didn't. It maybe. And I would say for people who are thinking about maybe deleting content, there are ways to do it where you can no index posts so they actually are still on your site, but Google doesn't have to crawl that page. And anyways, but there are ways to do it.

Yeah, I think that's great. And it's an important shift. I love that idea about every post having to earn its keep. And just because it's there doesn't mean it should stay there. And I think about that. It's easy for us to think about that in many other categories of our life. If you buy stuff and you have it at home, it's sitting on a shelf, it doesn't mean just because you bought it, you're going to keep it there forever. Eventually it might not be functional, it might not, you might not need it. And so you kind of transitioned out donate it, you know, sell it, whatever it might be. Content I think works in the same way where you, at some point it did have a function, it did have a purpose, but either that has degraded over time, there's not as much purpose for it, or maybe, maybe it never fully realized the purpose that you had originally intended for it. So when you went through this process of realizing two thirds of your content wasn't, you know, making it wasn't. What was the phrase used? It wasn't earning its keep. That concept. Did you just go in and say like, okay, if something has no clicks in Google Search Console, so you, so you go into Google Search Console and you sort to see the content that has very few or maybe no clicks from a search engine. All of that content, you go in and just say, go into WordPress, click delete and then that's it. Are you redirecting those somewhere? Are you? Or are you just letting those go to a 404?

Yeah, I think you do need to be strategic about it. And I would probably consult an expert like Casey or something.

Good disclaimer. Yeah.

Yes. For me, I first I, I did it in phases. So first I no indexed and then eventually I ended up deleting. So I liked, yeah, I like. I mean even when I'm decluttering my house, I'll put stuff in a paper bag and it'll go in the garage and it'll sit there for a few weeks.

There's a great Seinfeld bit where he talks about the garage being one step away from the garbage. And it's like the journey of stuff in our lives and like how we get it and we come home and like we set it on the shelf in the place of honor and then like it goes in a cupboard and then once it goes into the cupboard, eventually it will go to the garage and garage. I love that. But it's kind of similar what I hear you saying with your content, you know, index it. Which for those who aren't familiar with no indexing, essentially what that means is it still exists on your site, it's still there. But when the Google bot, like literally a bot or a crawler or a spider. Spider crawling on your site, when it comes, it's kind of like a stop sign for that bot to say, hey, no, I don't want you to go here, go somewhere else. And so you're intentionally saying to Google, not only do I not want this to show up on a search result, but I don't want you to crawl this, I don't want you to look at it. And it's not a guarantee that that will happen. Like many things with Google, there's no guarantees, but it's a really strong suggestion to the crawler for a search engine, primarily Google, we'll talk about Google. But to stop and noindex that. So essentially all of that site in the first phase for you, it still existed on your site. It was still there. People could read it. If they booked market, they could get there. But it was cleaning it up from a search perspective. So you're selecting a small group of content, one third of your content that was the best content. You just want to make sure that you shine a light on it. And two thirds which was not earning its keep. You're saying no index. But then eventually you went ahead and just said delete when you deleted it. Were you 404ing or redirecting at that point?

I was 404ing because I felt like if it really wasn't getting any search traffic, which all those posts, they were just none of them were getting search traffic. If there were a few that maybe they were kind of. They were similar enough to another recipe that was getting search traffic, I would redirect it. Or if I. It just can be very tedious that there Are some. I have a subscription to Ahrefs, and I'm sure there are free ways to do this. I think maybe majestic.com but you can take a link of a blog post and you can put it into one of these checkers and you can see if there are other websites pointing to it.

Yep.

And so, yeah, so I didn't want to lose a bunch of backlinks.

Yeah. And the value of that, which I think is a great little tip for people, is to say, hey, maybe there's. Maybe I'm not getting a lot of search traffic right now, but maybe for some reason this piece of content has a lot of quality backlinks. Like maybe it's from an authoritative site or another blog. And want to make sure that either you keep those by redirecting, or maybe it would be a consideration to keep that post up and maybe do an update on it or something like that. But important to point out, if you are doing a redirect, the redirect should be to something very, very similar to the piece of content that it was before. You shouldn't just, like, have one recipe in a certain category, like frozen grapes, and then redirect to chocolate chip cookies. Like, that's an incorrect use of a redirect. So it would make sense that that all or the majority of your content that you would delete would just be a straight 404. Because if there's not a highly aligned landing place for that, then you probably don't want to do a 301 redirect. And if there aren't any backlinks to that piece of content anyways, there isn't really a reason to do that 301 redirect. So you had mentioned Ahrefs as the tool that you're using. You put in the URL and it shows you from ahrefs database. Here are the places where we're seeing backlinks, if at all. So the check, it sounds like for you was, number one, am I getting search traffic from this? And you said you looked at three months of history for that, Is that right?

Yes.

Got it. So you go, three months of history, no search traffic. Do another check on ahrefs. Are there any backlinks here? If not, then at that point, did you move into, okay, I feel comfortable deleting this? Or were there other checks that you did? Like, hey, is this getting a ton of traffic on, like, Pinterest? Or, you know, maybe there's somebody who, you know, a thousand people who've bookmarked it and they're just coming as direct traffic. Was there any kind of last check that you did just to see if there's general trickle of traffic or at that point did you feel comfortable enough to say, you know what, I'm just okay deleting this?

I personally felt comfortable deleting, but I think that that is a good thing to do is is to consider whether you're getting for instance, you have a popular pin from even from three years ago that is still sending traffic. And I'm not exactly sure how to figure that out, but I do know that I did delete one post that was getting Pinterest traffic. And then when I did my SEO audit with Casey, he said, why did you delete that? That's getting Pinterest traffic. And I said, whoops. Oh, well.

Yep, lesson learned. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, and I was going to say one other consideration that I did also make was just whether that post was something I felt like updating.

Yeah, totally.

Is it even a recipe that I want to make again or fits into my site anymore?

Yeah, I love that. And that question is less of tactic and more of almost like branding or just your relationship to the content. If it's something that that you're not excited about, you don't feel like is a good fit, you wouldn't want to spend time remaking and rephotographing. Great. Like there's that's another consideration is what does it look like from an energy perspective for us to have a lot of energy around the content that we're creating and the work that we're doing? So I think that's wise and makes a lot of sense. So on the kind of Marie Condo Konmari method, does this spark joy and is this helping my business side of things? Was there anything else that you did from kind of a cleanup perspective with your site as you were looking to kind of correct some of the issues that maybe were tied into that Google Update impact?

Well, I'm also optimizing my category pages now and I will just say to other bloggers listening that I do recommend that SEO audit. I think it was really great to have a personalized approach, but I was able to do a lot of this work by listening to podcasts about SEO and listening to Food Blogger Pro podcasts and other things where you can really learn about SEO so you don't have to do an audit. If you can afford it, I think it is worth the money, but if you can't, you don't have to. But you still it's Wise to pay attention to SEO. And optimizing these category pages is something that I'm still working on. And it's really simple. It is just going into WordPress and for my categories, my theme allows me to make a custom description for a category page and that would be like dessert recipes, smoothie recipes. So I can go in and write a little description. These are. And actually I'm doing keyword research on. So I'll go into a keyword research tool and I'll of course smoothie recipes. That is going to be very competitive. But a category page can actually be appear on Google like a regular blog post. And so I would love to have my smoothie recipes page showing up on Google when they, when somebody searches for smoothies. But I've had to say, okay, dairy free smoothies, that's a little bit easier. Search term there's not as competitive. And so I can optimize that category page, I can give it a special heading. I was able to do this in my theme. So I don't, you know, everybody has to figure out how their website works, but I'm able to do that. I'm able to it. So a category of course pulls up all the recipes that have been tagged or marked in that category and then I can even highlight a few at the top. Don't miss this. Chocolate smoothies. Chocolate cherry smoothie.

Yeah. One of the things I love about that is the shift in viewing the value that we're creating from just individual pieces of content to the organization of that content. And I think of a parallel to Spotify. Spotify is great for pulling up and finding an individual song, but it's also a great place to go and find playlists that put together a bunch of different songs. And I think for a long time, ourselves included, bloggers have thought about songwriting. They've thought about blog posts and haven't thought as much about playlists or category pages in the example that you're saying. So in WordPress, you can create any category and you can put any individual poster page into that category and that will allow you to then have essentially a recipe playlist that you can refer back to and like you said, potentially rank for. So you probably wouldn't or I suppose you would. But one of the things that people could do is create a blog post that they try to rank for just smoothie, you know, dairy free smoothie in general. But what this allows you to do is maybe you have 30 different categories, 40 different categories, and each one of those is optimized by some Custom content, almost like you would on a post or page, along with the kind of programmatic adding of all of the different pieces of recipe or all the different pieces of content and the recipes you have in that general category. So in your approach to doing that, did you go back and revisit your categories? Did you update those? Did you change them? Or was it more of saying I'm going to keep the categories I have, but just start to actually pay attention to these category pages and update those?

Yeah. So I had had, since I'd been blogging so long, I think I had, oh my gosh, maybe 70 to 80 to 90 categories. So I have been slowly going through and I think another thing to think about because I know with blogging these days, oh my God, there's just so many things to do and you could.

Be doing everything always. It never ends.

Yes. So I keep reminding myself this is a marathon, not a sprint. So I'm thinking, I mean, okay, I'm, I've been blogging 10 years, I want to be blogging 20 years from now. Honestly, I'm 30 years from now. I can't imagine doing anything else. I love it so much. But I'm thinking that the little things that I'm doing on a daily basis or even a weekly basis, just little tweaks, maybe optimizing one category a week, that's going to benefit me 20 years down the line, hopefully. So I'm just, yeah, I'm just going handling it a little bit at a time, doing what I can. And just also to go back, you know, when my traffic was hit by 60% essentially last year, my revenue was hit that much. And then of course, with 2020 being so crazy, I've had a fraction of the sponsored post. I literally like probably 5% revenue in sponsored posts compared to last year, this year. And so one way, one thing that I just want to point out to other small or, you know, even medium sized bloggers is you really have to keep an eye on your expenses. And so that means that you end up doing everything or most of everything. So that's just another reason to be kind to yourself and not overwhelm yourself and just take it a little bit at a time. So, yeah, so that's how I'm handling categories, just a little bit at a time. And I have redirected some of the old categories that don't make sense, but I still have a lot of categories. And from my understanding, it's not like a bad thing to have a lot of categories.

Yeah. So I'M curious to know as you started to make these changes, as you started to no index and then delete content, maybe make some of these updates to the category pages. You had mentioned this 2020 being a really weird year, especially like March, April, May as it relates to traffic for a lot of sites. They recipe sites at least potentially saw an uptick in traffic that's not across the board. I have a friend who has a like dress for success blog and he's like, our traffic went in half. Like suddenly nobody needs to dress for success anymore. But for some recipe sites on uptick in traffic during that time. But then like ad rates went down and as you mentioned, brands are kind of pressing pause on sponsor content or at least were for a period of time. What did that look like though, from as much as you can understand to start to recover from that update, is that something that you still feel like you're in the middle of? Do you feel like you're making traction in starting to gain some of that back? I'd be curious to have kind of a real time update of where that's at, being that it's maybe about a year out now.

Yeah. So I am literally on the side of the mountain clawing with my fingernails. Yeah, the side back up the mountain. And I have a lot of other close blogger content contacts who are in the same situation. I have not had a bounce back. I did not do my SEO audit with Casey until literally I think three months ago. So yeah, it's been almost a year since that, you know, falling off the side of the mountain. And then I was actually hit again in January. So January of 2020. So there was another update in January and then the next one was in May. So it was November 19, 2019. January 2019. Just my traffic, you know, just horrible. I lost almost all my rankings. All my, all my recipes are on, you know, they're not on the front page of Google anymore. So yeah, unfortunately, even with when the lockdown happened and there, you know, with a lot more interest in cooking, none of my recipes are really showing up near the beginning on the first page. And so I didn't really get a lot of benefit, maybe a little bit like on Facebook and Pinterest. And then there was another update in May of 2020, but by that time I had done some changes, but I didn't really get a boost. And so you and I are talking at the end of September and I think there may be a update happening or there's one happening. It should be any day now, really. From what I've heard, because it's been almost. It's been over four months and. But no, my traffic is. It's, it's a little bit back.

Yeah. So.

But it's, it's still. Yeah, it's way, way down.

It's, it's one of the realities of this industry. And one of the first podcast episodes we did way back in October of 2015 was with Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes. And she came out and talked about what it was like to have a drop in 70% of her traffic for Simply Recipes. And it's like, you know, that's, it's, it's, it's a reality of Google, it's a reality of Facebook changing, Pinterest changing. And I think to your point, one of the things that's so important to remember is control the things you can control. And part of that is like, okay, something happened. I had this drop off. How do I recover from that? What are the things I can do to improve? And the other part, like you said, is how, as a business owner, how do I then control expenses connected to my business so as to suddenly not be operating at a loss? Right. So if you had a team of five people and suddenly 60% of your income went away, do you have enough savings? Do you have enough ability to be agile and to cut expenses, to be willing to do stuff on your own if you need to? I think that's a really good reminder to us as business owners to make sure that we're doing whatever we can to set ourselves up for success when those changes do come, because inevitably they will. That's something we're starting to do with all of our businesses, is saying, like, hey, how do we have six months of expenses saved up within each business? So when something changes, not if, but when something changes, that we have some buffer there to get us through that. So I think that's really good reminder as well on that piece. One last question. Is there any kind of mindset that you've adopted or any way that you're viewing this, to not let yourself become too discouraged? Because I know for myself, if I've gone through the process of getting some traction, having momentum, building something, and then it shifts and changes and that's taken away. It can become really discouraging, and it's hard to feel like you're redoing work to get back to where you were. Do you have any advice for people or insight into how you can have as positive a relationship with that, that work as possible? Yes.

So, okay, to Cry.

Yes.

It's okay to be angry. I think it's important to reach out to the community. There are a few Facebook groups that I rely upon. Of course. Food Blogger Pro is a big part of my support network. There's also a Facebook group, Food Blogger Central, and then I'm part of the mediavine Publishers Group. And I, I go in there and I just, I'm really honest again. Like with the frozen grapes thing, I'm having a really bad day. I'm feeling really discouraged. And I think ultimately when it comes down to it, I try to find just feeling of gratitude and also understanding, like, Google doesn't owe me anything. I haven't paid Google any money. So, you know, I don't pay Pinterest or Instagram. So whatever exposure that I get is, I'm just grateful for that and I'm grateful that I, I was able to cut my expenses. I didn't have to shut down my blog and, and try to find a job doing something else. I never want to work in an office again. I'm. I love working from home and I love getting messages from readers. Readers of my blog, you know, not fellow bloggers. I love that too. But readers who say, I love this recipe or you've inspired me to cook or to do whatever. I have a little in my notes application or whatever you call it, the Notes app. I. If I get a nice message or a nice comment that really touches me, I copy.

What a great routine to have.

Yeah. Yeah. And if I'm, I mean, because there. It has been a really hard year. Like, let's all of us understand this for so many reasons, it's been hard. And then. Yeah. To have your business feel like it's been decimated. But yeah, so, yeah, just feeling. And then I'm just so still. I just love blogging. And then we're going to talk a little bit about video and YouTube too. And that's kind of added like a little twist that's helping keep me excited.

Yes. That was gonna be you. Beat me. Beat me to the transition because I feel like it's helpful sometimes to introduce another area to learn and to be new at and to explore. But also it's a little bit of diversification and it's saying, okay, like, there's the reality of search traffic earning ad income on my blog, but there's other areas as content creators that we can be aware of and focus on and be intentional with from a business building perspective. And it sounds like for you, recently one of those areas has been YouTube so when did you decide to start creating video? And was that a hard thing to get up and running?

So I started seeing bloggers on YouTube about two years ago, I would say, and I noticed that they were bloggers, they were smallish bloggers, like about. I consider myself a small blogger, small to medium size. And I noticed that they were really growing an audience through YouTube. It's a really great place to build, almost like a separate audience. It can be a separate audience from maybe your blog readers or your Instagram viewers. I think there's some overlap between Instagram and a YouTube audience, but it can be a very effective way and it can be a great way to drive traffic to your blog. Because if you're making a recipe, you don't have to put the recipe in the description, you can put the link to your blog. And so you can actually drive traffic to your website from YouTube. And because video is such a different connection than somebody reading your blog, but if they're watching you make something in your kitchen, they can really connect to you in a much faster way than if they're reading a recipe on your website. And I noticed that with myself, I started getting drawn in to different channels. And I will say that I never really got into the hands and pans type videos. I just. Video was very overwhelming to me and then to try to make and photography is overwhelming to me. I just kind of do the best that I can and try to improve a little bit over time. But I never really did like the fancy lighting and the getting those beautiful bite shots and stuff like that. So I'm So with the YouTube, I'm talking more about like an actual cooking style show where I'm on camera or you know, there's a talent on camera, so to speak. A blogger is speaking to the camera and then actually making the food right there on camera. And so I started thinking about that as that it just seemed intriguing to build an audience that way and start to. Yeah, like diversify maybe outside of search traffic. And so I've been just playing with that. It's been a huge learning curve.

What are the things that you've learned that have been most helpful as you've. As you've gotten into it? Like the. Sometimes I refer to them as like the unlocks. Like what are the things you're like, oh my gosh, this is super helpful or super interesting. Knowing that you're in the early stages. Sometimes it's best to ask that question to people when those revelations or new learnings are as new as possible.

Well I think so. I thought every. All the photography or the videography, I guess, had to be really gorgeous and beautiful, like a hands and pans type video. I thought it just had to be perfect. But actually it's more about. I guess, like, the audio needs to be really great. So I do use a lavalier mic as opposed to. I mean, you can even shoot a YouTube cooking channel with your iPhone, but maybe you're really not going to get great audio. So having a separate mic or plugging in a mic to your iPhone and running it and hooking it onto your shirt, I think is important because the audio, it's okay if the video is not perfect, but the audio needs to be great. And I think also making this is kind of obvious, but making videos that. That people want to watch.

Yeah. It's a good reminder.

Well, because there's a temptation as a food blogger. Well, I'm just gonna find some recipes on my site and like instant pot rice.

That's super interesting. Yeah.

That'S been still working on that. And I mean, it is kind of interesting because you can have a strategy on YouTube where almost like a blog where you can do keyword research and try to find recipes that people will find through the YouTube as a search engine. But again, like, maybe balancing that with some videos where you're really appealing to an audience.

Yes. Yeah. I think it's a different type of skill in that suddenly what you're trying to do is keep people entertained and engaged as long as possible, as well as having success with creating a piece of content. So you kind of become an entertainer as well, or entertainer educator, I would say, as well as needing to have a quality product. In the case of doing recipes, was there any level of intimidation for you with stepping in front of the camera? You are somebody who's like, genuine and authentic, and I would assume that's one of your superpowers in some of your videos is being able to connect with people on that level. But it's also kind of scary to press record and then step in front of a camera and start talking. How did you go about doing that?

Yeah, and I don't know why, because I am one of the most introverted people. You know, I think it is actually easier for me, and maybe this would be comforting to other bloggers who are thinking about doing YouTube. For me, it is a million times easier to talk to a camera than to talk to a person.

Sure, sure.

So, you know, there's. There's nobody in the room, so it's just the camera. So It. If there were, maybe if I invited five people over.

Yes.

I mean, my friends, I wouldn't be nervous. If I had to go do a cooking demo at a grocery store, I would be full of anxiety.

Yeah.

I mean, I wouldn't sleep, I'd be sweating. But, yeah, for some reason, the camera is not that scary. Maybe it is. You know, it's a little. I mean, I do sweat a little bit. Yeah. And I don't, I don't like watching. I don't know.

I'm sure.

Yeah, it's hard, but it's not as hard as you would think it would be.

Yeah, that's great. And I think more than anything, I remember this with the podcast. I remember it with, you know, recording a course on Food Blogger Pro. The first time, I think, is often the worst time. And the more exposure that you can have to it, the more natural it'll become. So whatever the medium is for people, whether that be video, podcast, you know, writing, pressing, publish on a blog post, I think repeat exposure to those things that you want to be good at and continually do more of can be a really beneficial thing as well. So we're coming up here to the top of the hour here for this conversation that we're having, but want to make sure it's kind of a last question. We occasionally like to ask this, like, if you were to, you know, if everything was to go away, if you were to start over again, if you were to start today, Carrie, what. What would that look like for you, knowing what you know now, you still have all your knowledge, insight, wisdom that you've gained over the last 10 plus years. What would you do now, knowing what you know, if you had to start over?

Oh, I think I really like the idea of thinking about where I want to be in five years and then just building on that. Like, I. When I started my blog, I never thought about the future. I never thought about what my goals were with the blog. I just kind of enjoyed the process. And now when I think about what am I really building? Like, I mean, I'm putting my whole life into this. You know, I'm. This is my career now. I don't see myself really having another career. So I'm all in on this. So. But what am I actually doing and what is it going to be like? I mean, in the blink of an eye, we're going to be 20 years from now. And so what am I actually trying to build? And so for me, I really want to build a resource for women who are struggling, like, with Chronic illness. And so then it just. That really dictates what is, what does that mean I should do today? Like, what does that mean? Do I need another blog post to fill in the gap somewhere? Or do I need to make a YouTube channel or a YouTube video? Or do I need to. You know, it really kind of.

Yeah.

Really helps point me to what I need to do next.

Yeah, I think that it's, it's almost like it's mission, it's vision, it's its purpose. And when you step back and you know, I think a lot of what we do is we're in the forest and we're, you know, marching forward on a path. And this is an analogy that has been used with. We're going through the process of doing this thing called EOS for our team and they talk about this as the visionary. There has to be a vision where every once in a while you stop and you climb a tree and you're like, where am I going? And if you don't do that, you can potentially just kind of create this path and go around in circles. If you don't occasionally climb up and look and say, hey, I want to be there. And let's have the decisions I'm making today inform the path, the path and the direction or the direction that I want to go inform the path that I'm. That I'm creating and the progress that I'm making on a day to day basis. I think that's a really good reminder, not only for me, but for people who are maybe caught up in kind of the chaos of the day to day or the week to week, to be able to step back and say, what's the why? Like, start with the why of what you're doing and the purpose behind it and let that inform where you go from there. And I feel like it's a great note to wrap up on as well. But before we do, for those who do want to connect with you, you talk about how important those personal connections are. What would that look like? Carrie? What's the best way to follow along with what you're up and to reach out to you?

I would say that you can email me because I respond to all emails. And one thing that I'm also passionate about that I haven't really pursued is like an idea of like mentorship. And because I do feel like I'm like a veteran food blogger now. And I just, I love getting messages from people who are starting out and maybe they're struggling like with this idea of vision or having or setting a goal. And to me, like that's how I feel like I can give back is maybe giving encouragement, especially on a one on one basis. So I have a contact form on my website cleaneatingkitchen.com and yeah, I love to get emails and I'll respond and ask away.

Awesome. That's great, Kerry. So good to connect. Again, thanks for sharing your story in such a genuine and authentic way. I think it'll be both inspiring for people to hear it. I think there's also reassurance that comes along with the storytelling and I feel like there's probably a level of, you know, you talk about what your mission and vision is for five years. I think in having this conversation hopefully be able to help in the pursuit of that mission and that vision. So thanks so much for coming on Kerry. Really appreciate it.

Thanks bwork.

And that's a wrap for this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thanks again for tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed this episode, this interview with Cari, and if you have any questions or thoughts or you want to access some of the resources that Cari mentioned today, you can find them all@foodbloggerpro.com tub that URL will take you directly to our show notes for this episode and we'd love to chat about your takeaways and your thoughts about this episode. As always, Food Blogger Pro is open for enrollment right now and you can learn more about joining this incredible community of nearly 2000 bloggers@foodbloggerpro.com membership. Every food blogger Pro member gets access to hundreds and hundreds of lesson videos and exclusive deals, a community forum, and so much more. It's just an incredible community of people. And during a time when connection is just even more important than it usually is, it's so great to have a community like this to lean back on, to collaborate with, and to troubleshoot with. It's a wonderful, wonderful community. So that does it for us this week. We'll see you again next time. And until then, make it a great week.

Sam.