358: How Anela Malik Grew a Successful Subscription-Based Membership Community

A big thank you to Clarity for sponsoring the Food Vlogger Pro podcast. You've heard me talk about Clarity before. It's a tool that we're building and using for Pinch of Yum, but also a really powerful tool for anybody who's focusing on content. It's kind of one of the main vehicles for growth or revenue for their site. And we've been working on Clarity for a couple years, but it hasn't been until recently that we've started to bring other people in to sign up and become a part of it. We're doing an offer right now that we're calling 25 forever. So the first 500 people who sign up for Clarity will get their account at $25 a month. Forever. We're still in the early stages of offering this, but we'll cap it at 500 people. So once we have 500 people who have signed up, then we're going to cap that. We're going to move to a different pricing for Clarity. So it's still in the early stages. You know, it's not going to be the kind of thing where we're at this point where we'd cap it and say, hey, you can't sign up. Uh, you've missed your. Missed your chance. Uh, but slowly and surely we're moving to that 500 mark. So if you're interested in, in joining and checking it out, now would be a good time to do that. Um, there's no commitment, there's no plan that you have to join and can't cancel. So you can check it out. You can, you can see if it's a good fit. And how do you know if you would even be interested in it? Well, Clarity is for anybody who's focusing on content and also starting to focus on optimization of their existing content. So we have this belief that any and every site is gonna be suboptimal right now. There's gonna be broken images, broken links, there's gonna be posts that don't have internal links that could or don't have external links to helpful resources. There's gonna be images with missing alt text. There's gonna be content that's starting to perform worse that if you looked at and kind of improved and enhanced, it would increase rank. We're really just thinking about that for Pinch of Yum a lot. What are, what are the ways that we could improve the content that's currently on our site as opposed to just creating new content? And we're using Clarity as the tool where we track that and make those enhancements and improvements. One of the things that comes along with that is you can join the Slack community that we have of other content creators. And this just came up the other day. Somebody posted and they said, I had no idea that it had broken images on my site, but somehow those images broke. So I need to, number one, find out how they broke and then, number two, fix them. But they were just saying that they noticed that because of Clarity and some of the filtering that they were able to do. So they created a project. They filtered first and said, show me all the broken images on my site. And then it was like, oh, there's some broken images. Then they filtered. After filtering those, they created a project that was fix broken images. Now, you could then have somebody on your team go in, make those improvements, make those enhance enhancements. Or if you don't have somebody on your team, that can be the type of stuff where maybe once a week, once a month, you kind of have this maintenance or kind of like spring cleaning mindset where you go in, you block the day out to make improvements, make enhancements. You're not creating new content. You're just going in and optimizing and improving and paying attention to older content and making sure that it's at 100% as opposed to, you know, 70%, which, if I were to guess, I would say all of our sites, pinch of Yum included, would probably be operating at like 70% of their true potential value. And we want to find ways that we can improve that. And we're using clarity as the tool to not only discover those things, but also to organize the tasks and projects that go along with improving them. So we're still in the early stages of it. We're excited about what it's going to be and what it's going to grow into. And we're also excited to learn from you in the process of what you would want it to be. Which is why we have that Slack community that we will welcome you to if you are interested in signing up. So you can go to clarity.com food C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food if you're interested in signing up. All right, that's a wrap for this little ad read. Let's go ahead and jump into today's episode. Hello.

Hello, this is Bjork. You're listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. But this isn't about me. It's about you and the people we are interviewing. And the hope for these interviews is always that we are Talking to people who are doing interesting creatures, creative, significant things in the world so that you, the listeners, can learn from those things that those people are doing. That is the case today with Anela Malik, who runs Feed Them a Leak and has a community. That's really her focus for what she's doing is building this community. She's not focused necessarily on sponsor content or ad revenue. She's really being creative and strategic about how she wants to build her business. And the way she's doing that is by focusing on her community, magic at the margins. And people, people sign up and they're part of that community. And she's gonna talk about what that's like, how she's done that, what that's looked like over the last few years, and really just her thoughts around being a business owner, being strategic about content creation and how she directs the followers that she does have. Not necessarily towards a piece of content or trying to get as many views as possible, but really thinking strategically about how do I speak to people who could potentially be members of my community. And that being a really deep, different way that she's approaching content creation and a different focus from a lot of people that think about, you know, building a food blog or a food publishing site where they think strategically about traffic and monetization through ads and sponsored content. And this is really a different take on it. And I think it's great to have these interviews where we can look at different angles in different perspectives on how we can think about publishing content and the purpose behind that. So it's going to be a great interview.

Really excited to share it with you.

An Ella, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, this is going to be a great conversation. We're going to be able to go in a lot of different ways. I feel like one of the things that as an interviewer, I always need to be careful about doing is like, we're going to go down some rabbit trails. Maybe it's ant. Ant trails. I had an ant farm growing up, so, like, going down ant trails. But I'm always going to try and come back and then go down the other ant trail or rabbit trail. Because you have a lot and a lot of different conversations that we can explore and places that we can go. But as we often do. Would love to roll the tape back to a point where you were starting to think about what it looks like for you to be somebody who publishes content online and maybe, like, you can start with what you consider yourself. Do you consider yourself a publisher, influencer? Creator. How do you describe yourself when you meet somebody who's new and doesn't know what you're doing?

That's so hard because I think there's a lot of stigma still around the word influencer, but I do think that's the most accurate. I'm an influencer and writer. Depending on who I'm talking to, I might say content creator who focuses on food and travel.

Nice. So at what point would you have said like, hey, I am a creator, I am an influencer, whatever the word would be. When did you kind of settle into that in terms of that's who you are in the world? Is it five years ago? Six years ago?

A year ago?

A year ago?

You said six years ago. And I'm like, oh, no. So I started blogging as a hobby and I never ever expected it to be anything other than a hobby. And so because of that, I think it took me a little bit longer to, once I started doing it full time and once I started taking it more seriously, to start considering myself as a content creator or an influencer.

Yeah, when, when was that that you started to do it full time? And did you, were you like, hey, I know I want to do this, I want to build it into a career, so I'm going to focus on doing this full time and bridge the gap? Or was it like, hey, I've actually gotten to the point where I can do this sustainably as a full time career, as a full time job.

So neither.

Neither one option C or other. Yeah.

So once upon a time, I think I've had Feed Them a League for four and a half years and I always expected it to be a hobby blog. I was a diplomat and I was serving abroad and I actually started my blog to practice skills that I might need for my career. And so in the Foreign service as a diplomat, my specialty was public diplomacy. I needed to learn how to make social media content, how to edit videos, how to speak to people, how to write marketing copy. And all of that was part of my career. So I thought, oh, this hobby blog will be a way for me to practice as a junior officer. And then frankly, after a few years, I needed to leave that behind. It wasn't working for me and my family. And so this was.

When you say that, what do you.

Mean that I needed to leave the Foreign Service behind?

How did you know that you needed to. How did you know that you needed to leave it behind? That you're done?

So I don't know how much people know about the Foreign Service but when you're a diplomat, you give up a lot of control. Similar to being in the military, you don't have very much control over where you live. It's very, very hard on your spouse. So my husband followed me overseas. And depending on where you're assigned, you might be assigned in a country where it's illegal for your partner or your spouse to work. So they're really giving up a lot and so forth. For my marriage, it was not working and my husband was incredibly gracious for a few years. But we both realized that we needed a change. So this was two years ago now and I was living in Washington D.C. i was there for training and the COVID 19 pandemic hit and we just realized if we're going to make a change, we have to do it now. And so I quit and I thought I had some inklings that feed them leak could be a full time thing, that I could make it work as a sustainable business. But I didn't actually know. I just knew that I needed to find something and I hadn't really monetized my platform before. And so it was just a leap of faith. And I always knew that if it didn't work out, I would just have to find a job. Yeah, thankfully it did work out.

That's awesome. And I'm excited to hear kind of what that looked like. What were those inklings like when you said there was something? My sense is you kind of had an idea of there was something there. Like when people would, you know, go and pan for gold, for instance, and you start to see little flex there. You like, maybe there's some nuggets that I can discover. It sounds like that was kind of happening. What were those little clues that were around that it could potentially be something.

So I'll be really frank. In June of 2020, I went viral for work that I had been doing for a long time because I'd always been sharing about like black owned restaurants and black food folks on my platform. But it was June of 2020, so suddenly the world's attention was turned to that and my platform exploded. I think I, on Instagram went from a few thousand followers to 20,000 followers in a week. And I kind of expected it to die down. And during this process, I was also considering leaving my job already. But it didn't really die down. And I realized that I was starting to get more inquiries that could legitimately pay our bills. And I was also writing on my website at the time, and I still am, and my work started being reshared by editors of major papers. And I realized maybe I'm onto something here. I just never considered that this could be a serious thing.

Yeah, I think there's. What's exciting about that, or encouraging is you were doing the work. Like, it's not like you saw this and you're like, hey, I'm going to go in this direction. You were doing the work, and you were there when there was a need that arose. And you obviously were somebody who, like, was creating content that resonated with people. And I think sometimes it can seem like, man, we're showing up every day, we're doing good work. Why am I not getting any traction? I think sometimes it's like, if you stick with it, good work is good work. And. And, you know, when you show up every day and publish that and put that into the world, like, I have the strong belief that eventually good work will get discovered. And it seems like that was. That was the case for you. Also, though, it's like, it can. While it's exciting, sometimes it can also be kind of intimidating or, like, a lot of pressure, especially around something that is so deep and meaningful. Like the conversations that people were having around race in June of 2020 and continue to have. What was that like for you to navigate that? And did you feel this, like, pressure around that, or was it just pure excitement to be able to share and have people to that would listen? What was that like?

I think people, content creators often want to go viral. And I am always really honest that for me at least, it was the worst experience in the world. It was like overnight, everyone wants something from you, and some of those opportunities are great. And opportunities came my way that have changed my life. But there's no way, as one person, you can manage that flow of information. So you just feel like you're drowning until it subsides. And for me, it was like three to four months until it subsided. It was incredibly overwhelming and exhausting.

Yeah, I can imagine. What do you feel like you learned from that process? It's kind of trial by fire. You're thrown into it. It's not like incremental. Little by little. It's jumping quite a few stages along the way.

Yeah. So I learned to say no, which at first, you know, I wanted to do everything, to be everything, and I had to learn very quickly to just say no to opportunities if they weren't kind of 100% in alignment with what I wanted to be doing or with my own interests. And then I got really, really good very quickly at Least I feel at contract review, because suddenly, I had never really monetized my blog or my website. I had never expected to. And suddenly, for example, like, National Geographic came calling, and they were like, we want you to write a book for us. And I was like, I don't know anything about book publishing. I don't know anything. I don't know what a good deal looks like. I don't know what a good contract looks like. So, of course I got a lawyer. But I feel like that process taught me to be unashamed about asking questions, pushing back and asking, what does this mean? What is the purpose of this clause? And that, I think, has been really important for me now that I'm really treating my work as a business.

Yeah, it's one of those things. I was actually just having a conversation with Mary, who's an executive assistant on her team, and she's like, man, it feels like from the outside, you think entrepreneurs, this, like, glamorous thing. And it's, like, so awesome. And you're, like, snapping these photos and posting to Instagram, and she's like, there's just, like, a lot of, like, taxes and contracts and paperwork. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's just so true in this world. And there is a lot of really cool things and positive things and, like, potentially things that would be viewed as, like, not glamorous necessarily, but just cool things that come from it. But a lot of it is like, oh, like, you got really good at contract review. Like, that's a thing that you do when you're creating and publishing and working with brands. It's like, it's a skill that you develop that nobody really puts in their Instagram bio. So when you look back at that time, my guess is you're also, you know, you're quickly refining these skills and abilities. You're learning how to do things like contract review. But I'm also guessing you probably are refining, or maybe not. Maybe it didn't shift. I guess that's the question. Like, what you're publishing content about in, like, the mission of what you're building. Did that shift and change for you? Or did you find that that stayed pretty similar throughout the last two years, really?

So it's shifted a little bit. I'd say my core mission is kind of the same. So on my platform, I really try to explore nuance. So history, culture, politics. I have a political science background, so that kind of informs my way of looking at the world and share joy, embrace, kind of the sense of wonder that we get from exploring the world. And I was really hyper focused on food for a long time. And that was really just the result of the pandemic. And I didn't want to travel or showcase travel on my account until I was fully vaccinated. I made the personal decision that I didn't think it was super responsible. And now, of course, I'm vaccinated. And in the past few months, I've started to do more travel again. So I'd say my core mission is the same, but the ways that I engage in those topics is a little bit different.

Yeah, that makes sense. And wanting to make sure the decisions you're making in what you view as like a responsible decision is reflected in the content that you're producing. I know for a lot of travel bloggers, man, what a hard thing. Whereas for food, it's kind of the opposite. Everybody's at home making food. Travel bloggers, people who talk about travel and going to different places, it's kind of the opposite. Like, everybody's at home. So it's like people aren't searching for things to do in Austin. It's like things to do in my basement. Right. So it's like this shift that happens. Um, what has that been like for you to introduce a new type of content on your platforms? And have you been had to be strategic about, like, what that looks like to introduce it?

I. I just kind of went for it. Um, I figured if. If this is something I wanted to do, I had to just, you know, plunge. I had to just jump in and see what happened. And so far, the response has been amazing. But I feel like with my audience, the response I feel has been so good, and they've resonated so much with the content. Because I'm still telling kind of the same stories, I'm still focusing on the same elements. I still kind of have the same content pillars. I'm just now doing it through travel. And if you think about food, food is so related to travel. What is something we all want to do when we're in a new place? We want to go out to eat, we want to go find the best cocktails, we want to try this place we've heard about. So I feel like the two go hand in hand, and there's not a huge gap for food folks to also be interested in travel.

There's this great Jim Gaffigan bit that I often refer back to whenever Lindsay and I travel. And he's like, vacation or travel is just eating in places you've never been before, which Is like not entirely true, but like almost entirely true. You know, obviously there's like a thousand good things that come along with travel, but like to your point, one of the main things is eating in a new place. And so those, those go hand in hand pretty well. I'm curious to know what you've discovered. You know, you've talked about contract review, working with brands and things like that, but when you look at your business, what are the kind of areas that you've experimented with for kind of building streams of revenue? And I know you've done some kind of unique to this space. Um, you've looked at kind of some unique opportunities and created income and I think are really smart ways that a lot of people aren't thinking about. Um, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that and for you to share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So I was coming from a very stable financial background, having been a federal employee. And when I took Feed Them lead full time, I immediately was like, I need to invest in multiple streams of income. It was first and foremost for me because I knew that brand partnerships were fluid. It ebbs and flows and I was like, I don't have space for that much ebbs flow right now.

I really don't.

So I invested pretty early on in building a subscription platform. I was using Patreon and then I moved it actually recently over to my own website, which was scary but was really successful just to have more control over the content.

What did you not like about Patreon that that made you decide that you wanted to move?

Oh, so many things.

So how much time do we have?

Yeah, so I actually, I won't say that Patreon is all bad. Right. It's a, it's a purpose built solution so you can get started on patreon in like 30 minutes. You just type in the information, you're good to go. But I found that for the, the fees they take. So they were take it depends on the tier you're in, but up to like 13% of what you're making on there gets eaten by fees. And, and to have such a high fee structure, I found that the just functionality was really lacking. The releases, the content you can create in there, it doesn't look good and it's not easy to input into their system on the back end. And again you're not in control. So you don't manage customer service which if people are paying you money, you do want to be in control of that in my view. So I opted after about a year, I think 14 months to transfer off of Patreon and I, I'm now hosting my community on my own website, which has been great. I mean, it was a big push to get people to transfer and to make sure we didn't have a huge drop off. But it looks better, it feels better. I have way more engaged audience on my website now, so I think it was ultimately the best decision.

And it's interesting, I feel like one of the things behind Patreon is kind of like, hey, you're supporting this person. Whereas you can kind of like Patreon has branded what Patreon is. Whereas when you shift, you can brand what it is versus, you know, an example would be like supporting a creator artist versus, like a community of people. Was that, did that tie into it at all in terms of reasoning for switches? Like just branding what it actually is?

Yeah. And I actually think that even some of Patreon's features are designed to go along with what Patreon views the platform as being for. Like a space for people to support their favorite creators, which is great. If you want to sign up for my subscription just because you want to support me, please do.

Right, right.

But I wanted to build a community where people were engaged, where we. So it's a food focused community. We have weekly drops where we go deeper on food and beverage and I want people to ask questions. I want folks to feel like this is a space where we can learn, we can get better in the kitchen. We can, you know, one week we'll dig into history of American barbecue as an, you know, an indigenous kind of technique that was then shepherded into what it is today by black peoples who were really the stewards of American barbecue. That will be topic one week and then the next week we'll have a cooking class led by, you know, a virtual cooking class led by a chef. So Patreon didn't have features to kind of support all of that in a way that felt organic. And I think it's because they view it as, oh, this is just a place for people to support their favorite creators. Not necessarily as a space to build a community.

Yeah. What, what did you use to build it out? So my guess is. Are you on WordPress for your site?

Oh, no. And, and yeah. So I am on wix and I love my WIX website and wix, do.

They have a membership component within that? Nice.

They have a membership component and it didn't cost me any additional money. The processing fees are really low and it didn't take me very long to put together. And so I always, I know most food bloggers in this niche. We invest in our websites and SEO and page site speed and all of that. And I fundamentally made a choice very early on that I did not have that capacity. And I made a bet that if I put really good content on my website, it would be fine. And so far that bet has been accurate. So I love that WIX and Squarespace tend to load slower, all of these other things. And I still have many pages that rank on the first page of Google. You know, I still have a website that people seem to enjoy and come back to. And so one day maybe I will pay someone to build a new website and transfer me over, but for now, I'm not interested.

I think what I love about that is you had this vision of what you wanted and you said, you know what a lot of people might say, like, this is best practice for this thing. But here's what I'm trying to build in a great example of where some of the other types of content management systems, Squarespace or wix, would be, A better solution would be like, hey, I want a membership component. Like, I want this to be really easy. I don't want to have to, like, pay a developer to custom build it. When we look at Food Blogger Pro, there's a lot of custom building that we did with that, that we could because we had been doing it for eight years. Um, but like, if you're just looking to get up and running and started, it's like, hey, let's do an analysis of all the different options and which one fits best with the solution that I want to have, which I think is great. I love that. What have you found to be the biggest impact? So you have your, you know, membership component. The thing that's great about that with the community is like, it's predictable. Right? So, like, it's not like you with sponsored content. You have, you know, a huge, A huge successful month and then it goes away and then like two months later you have somebody else reach out. There's a predictable element to that, which I think is really nice. But anything else that you'd point out for the different kind of revenue strategies that you have, knowing that you're doing it in unique and creative ways, that has worked well.

Yeah. So, okay, a couple things about my subscription committee is my primary focus for revenue because it's predictable and because I really like the space. So if I'm interested in it as a creative, then I just find I have so many more ideas for that space, I want to invest in it, but to get into the nitty gritty that might be useful for other folks, for example, if you're interested in building something for yourself. And I always wonder when I look at other food bloggers websites, why they don't do this. So a lot of food bloggers that I see, I know they want to wait to build their traffic up to a certain point until they can maybe run ads with mediavine or something. And I was like, what if I just build ads for myself? So I made some graphics in Canva that looked nice, started embedding them in various pages of my website and basically just looked at Bon Appetit and other food magazines and see where they're placing their ads, whatever. And so that actually is how I drove a lot of traffic to my subscript and to my newsletter just by being like, well, I'm not going to wait until I'm on an ad network. I'm going to put ads on my website for things that I care about now. And that's been really, really successful for me. So that's something I always try to put a bug in people's ear about that you can wait for mediavine, but you can also prioritize whatever you want to prioritize. And like Canva is right there. You don't even have to have to use Adobe. You can go in there and make a graphic that's clickable, you know, add the, add the link that it directs to and you're good to go.

Yeah, that's, I think what it's another example of just like thinking strategically. Like there's this playbook. So many people follow this playbook. Hey, I want to build a bunch of traffic, get, you know, search optimization, all these things are really good, you know, get an ad network, start to monetize. But it's like, wait, there's like so many other options out there in terms of how you can be doing this. And I had this conversation at a conference last week where somebody was like, you know, I'm trying to build up this following so I can, you know, create this amount of income from traffic. I was like, oh, there's a lot of ways you can do that. You can do that through, you know, service based content. You can do it, you know, in your case, like sponsored or community. And so to think critically about like, what, what am I after and how do I get there? And there's a hundred different paths that you can take. This being a good example of one of those. What have you found to be most successful in terms of kind of surfacing that community to people. Email. Can people sign up whenever they want? What are the things that you've learned just from, like, a marketing standpoint with that community?

Yeah. So from a marketing standpoint, I would say that you need to market relentlessly if you're using social media as your primary means of marketing, because, as we know, algorithms don't show your content to everyone that follows you. And so I've done some. Some testing. For example, I do a feed post on Instagram about my community every week. I share about about it on stories with clickable links at least twice a week. And then once a month, I'll do a survey on my stories to say, like, did you know this about my community? Did you know that polls. Yes. No, et cetera. There's always at least 15%, sometimes higher, of people who have no idea. Yeah, my community is right. And so it just goes to show that you have to be really, really kind of like, shameless in your marketing if you're promoting something that you care about. And I have found that a couple things usually drive a lot of subscriptions, so anything that builds a sense of fomo. So we host events in our community, and every time I share about an event, people, you know, I get a slew of signups because they feel like they're missing out on something.

Right.

And the events are great, but they're not even the primary focus of the work we do in there.

Do you have an example of that? Like, you have an event coming up within the community and you share about it. Hey, this is coming up at this point.

Yeah. And so, for example, this is one thing I did. And I would also say for anyone who's working on brand partnerships, to think about the content you create for brand partnerships, think about how strategic you are when you're filming, you know, the videos or the photos you're taking, and then apply that strategy to yourself to your email newsletter even. So we had a cocktail class that was hosted virtually for the community, and she sent the recipes in advance. So I filmed the cocktail in advance as if I was filming a brand partnership. Like a beautifully shot cocktail video. And then I just posted it with some text and a little voiceover about how I can't wait to make this cocktail. In my community, we have these exclusive classes, and boom. And then after the cocktail class, I took that same video that had already made and layered in a few shots from the virtual class. So, like me interacting with the class on the laptop, things like that. And I'll post that again in a couple weeks. And so, yeah, to take all of that work you would do for a brand, you can also do for yourself.

Yeah, right. And to think strategically. We've, even with the podcast, we've started to think about this. Alexa and Leslie, who are part of the Food blogger pro team and do a lot of the behind the scenes work to pull off the podcast. Like, hey, what if we take a little clip of this and we share it to Instagram and YouTube? What are the different places we can share? But to think strategically about marketing as well and to say, great. So I'm creating this piece of content. What does it look like to kind of weave in some. It's like gentle marketing. Like, it's not like, sign up, sign up, sign up. It's like, hey, this thing is happening and it's really cool and you might be interested. Here's how you can sign up for it. And that feels like content marketing at its best because the content is still valuable in and of itself. But then you kind of layer on this ability to kind of shine a light on this community and the fact that people can sign up for it. So how about on the community front, is there anything that you would do differently or that you've learned after building this community that others should think about if they're kind of interested in doing something similar?

Oh, absolutely. So first and foremost, I would say that the subscription space is changing. It's getting more competitive because more creators, independent writers, just more people are launching subscriptions. They have various niches, various foci, but that's more competition. And then we live in a subscription world. I've done a lot of polling with my audience about why they would or would not join a community. And they've said, these are expensive when you add them up. So when you subscribe to two substacks, two Patreons, and then Netflix, Hulu, hbo, at the end of the month, you'll get a few hundred dollars usually. So I started with a model that I think was similar to how most people structure theirs. At least on Patreon, where you have higher tiers, where people get more benefits. I opted to move away from that and just make it so that everyone gets the same benefits. And then I reduced the prices to make it truly, truly affordable. I have a $2 a month option. And what I found is that very few people select the $2 a month option. And I'm assuming the people who do need to, but they're interested in my work and they want to engage with it. And a lot of people still select the Highest option, the $10 a month option, and it kind of evens out towards the middle, towards five bucks a month. So I would say that if you're thinking about building a subscription, think about what your community can truly afford. And maybe if you're a content creator that focuses on luxury goods or a luxury space of some sort, maybe your community has more disposable income. But I think a lot of food folks, we're talking to moms, we're talking to like, you know, busy folks who just want to be better home cooks or people who just have a passing interest in food. So I think it's really thinking about accessibility and affordability as the space grows and becomes more competitive is going to be really important.

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, when I scroll down and look at this, my assumption, when I looked at the pricing, I'm looking at the pricing page here for magic at the margins 2, 5 and 10, like you said. And I was like, oh, it's like standard pricing where you get more if you pay 10. But it's not, it's like, hey, what's your budget? You're going to get access to the community regardless. And it's encouraging to know that some people are like, I can afford $10 and that's what I want to do. And that's maybe aligns with the Patreon part of people would pay more even if they don't have to, because it's like, hey, here's somebody that I want to support community that I want to be a part of. Similar to services or apps, you actually want to pay for those if you want those to continue to be around. Same with communities. How do you view the community in regards to are you kind of the central piece behind the community or is it like the community is the central piece behind the community? Does that make sense? Are people buying into the community or are they buying into access to communicate and connect with you?

So I think it's both. I think it usually starts and this is because most of my subscribers come from social media, so they're coming to the community that they identify with me as the person they see on Instagram Stories or the person they see on TikTok and they subscribe to be just part of whatever I'm offering. Then the feedback that I've gotten a few months later. I always follow up with folks to see what you like, what you don't like. I ask for testimonials for Feedback. And they always say kind of the same thing. I joined because I think Feed the Malik is a really dope brand and I want to see it grow. But then what I found was this is a really incredible community space. And I feel like, you know, I can sample from the releases you have from the events, like, there's something for me. And the community itself is really welcoming. So I feel like it starts with me and then it kind of transitions to being the community aspect.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. And really inspiring to know that there are people who are doing good work in the world and then also figuring out ways to make it work in a typical ways. Which the typical, like I said before, is like, hey, search, traffic, monetization through ads, as much traffic as possible. And that equation just looks different for you. Traffic's still great, followers are still great. But what really matters is how many people are engaged in getting value out of this community. So do you think that when you think of your business, are the metrics that you're looking at a little bit different? And what are those even? Like, I hear you talking a lot about asking your audience or asking community members questions. Even that behavior is, I think, super strategic and really smart. But what are the things that you're looking at in terms of, hey, is there success within this business outside of just like traffic?

Oh, yeah, I don't really track traffic. I mean, I'm working finally with someone on SEO and he's like, you gotta get it together, girl. Cause he's an SEO person. And I'm like, ah, you know, so when I think of my business, I first think of the subscription community. What can I offer? And also, what are we interested in engaging in together in the food and beverage space? Um, and then I think of metrics for success. For me even look different on social media because a lot of my content on social media is sales content directed at promoting community. So, for example, sales posts on social media never get the same engagement as other posts, but I view them as successful is if they even generate dms, like with questions about the community. But I mean, ultimately if they generate sales. Right. And so those posts might have horrific engagement, but they always, if I post one, will it get at least one signup? Often I'll get a few or a dozen. And so I had to kind of divorce myself from these metrics of looking at likes, comments and shares on social media, because those engagement metrics do not matter for that kind of work. There are other posts that I'll have where I'M like, yeah, I would like this to do well in a more traditional sense. I'm just starting to think about SEO on my website and working to boost my web traffic through search because I've had a lot of success, but most of my traffic has always been direct. It's always come directly from Twitter, from Instagram, or from my email newsletter. And I, I'm just starting to be like, okay, I have the space now to work on this, so I'm going to work on it.

Yeah. And it, and what you did is really, you shifted things where instead of starting with like, hey, I'm going to get a bunch of search traffic and then figure out how to monetize you figured out how to create a predictable revenue stream and then it's like, great, what can I layer on top of this? That becomes an additional kind of entry point for people who are coming in. And one of the things we've thought a lot about here with the team for Food Blogger Pro is like, things are shifting in a way where it's not just blogging, it's like it's creators. And there's a lot of people who are creating like social first businesses that are supported maybe with a blog as an afterthought. Whereas 10 years ago you'd have your blog and then maybe you'd have social as an afterthought. And I think that's in a lot of ways it's shifted where people will get their initial traction on a social platform and then they'll come back around and say, like, great, what does this mean As I bring this into a website? So it's interesting to see that kind of existing for you. What are the other platforms that you look at, like TikTok, YouTube, are you super focused on one? And you're like, you know what, I can go deep on Instagram, continue to go deep here, or are you saying I'm going to try and go to these other platforms and expand out as well?

So I started on Instagram and I think like every Instagram creator have a love hate relationship with the platform. Not a single Instagram creator is like 100% for it, but I think it's a great tool. I would say that my approach is usually to go deep on one platform until I feel like I really have it down, until I can kind of predict with, with decent accuracy how something there is going to perform. When I feel like I really have figured out all the features and the tools and I can really talk to my audience there and only then will I start to add other things on. So I'm there with Instagram and I started experimenting with TikTok about six months ago is when I started taking TikTok seriously. And you know, I think I had like five posts on there before and had. I did still still feel like I don't understand it. But TikTok's my priority now because I want to learn it. And I think it's. It's less from. For my kind of business, it's less this like drive to grow, but it's more this. I like video and I like short form video and I find it fascinating. And so TikTok to me is really stimulating and I get a lot of ideas there, so I want to continue to operate in that space. Um, and I've learned a lot about video from just being on TikTok.

Right.

Just kind of.

What are some examples?

So I would say that Instagram video still tends to have much higher production value, which is great. But if you're someone like me who is starting out without a videography background or photography background whatsoever, jumping into trying to make videos like Instagram creators are making videos was not accessible.

Yeah.

And I feel like TikTok is really, really good at taking videos with low production value and still making them interesting. So what I've learned from TikTok is how to make me talking to the camera for 60 seconds interesting with no effects, with no fancy tools, with nothing but my phone. And I think that that has also made my Instagram content better. So TikTok, I felt like, was a great place for someone who was new to big video to try to figure it out. And I am just starting to experiment with on TikTok as well. But again, for myself, marketing, for my community, I know how to sell on Instagram and for me, selling on TikTok is still very, very new.

Yeah, I think what's so great about what you just talked about is like, content at its core has to be engaging and captivating and it's such an art to be able to get to the point where like, hey, you have 60 seconds. How do you make you sharing a thought or talking into the camera, Captivating in a way where it keeps people around for 60 seconds and that transfers to Instagram, it transfers to YouTube, it transfers to any platform. And really the skill that you're developing is like, how do you create engaging content? And it's going to transfer to whatever platform is trendy in 10 years. So it's really this skill that's so hard to say. Here are the 10 tips to create better engaging content. But also, you know, when you're getting better at it because you see people being more engaged or you see some of those like, metrics shifting potentially. But would you be able to identify a few things that you've learned or have adapted or have changed when it comes to content creation that have kind of leveled you up along the way?

Yeah. So I think of myself as a video first creator now, which I think just a little bit over a year ago, I had never really made video, so I'm a video first creator now. We incorporate video in my subscriber community. We incorporate it on Instagram, on TikTok and on my website. And now when we're thinking about video, it's much more strategic than it used to be. I still kind of choose projects based on what I'm interested in in the moment. I'm always going to be that creator who's like, eh, whatever's trending, like, I don't care. I want it. Like, this sounds cool to me. But once we have the concept, it's like thinking about a hook. And I will test hooks with my friends. I will text them various versions of the first sentence in the voiceover to see which one they like better. And so I would say if you're working on content strategically, having a hook, and even if you're thinking about photo, then really think about what's going to be above the fold in that caption. And of course the photo can help stop the scroll. You can have a beautiful photo. But I do think there's kind of a TikTok effect on Instagram where people are looking for more than pretty photos now. They're looking for more storytelling or more substance on Instagram. And so having a hook, having a strong opening that really draws people in, but it's also not like clickbaity. Right, right. Having a hook that's relevant to the video and relevant to your mission statement.

Do you have an example of what that might look like?

Yeah. So I'm working on a series right now about black excellence in food in Northwest Arkansas. And this is of course something that came to me unintentionally by my audience from my audience. When I moved here from dc, they said a lot of folks said, well, there's no one black in Northwest Arkansas. And like, yeah, it's not D.C. levels of diversity. There are black people here, I promise. And so I've met these incredible local business owners that are doing just really cool stuff and food here. So I want to showcase them and I'm thinking about this as kind of a video mini series, so each episode I can showcase a different business owner and have them tell their stories and layer in great visuals, whatever. For the first one I need a hook. And so I was texting my friend group earlier to test out these hooks. And the hook for the voiceover is going to be just drawn from my personal experience. People love to tell me that there's no one black in northwest Arkansas. That's not true. We're here. Check it out. Like something like that, right? It's honest, it's relevant to the video that's going to follow and it's going to draw people in because it's either controversial or it's really funny, or it's just something even really personal that people can relate to.

Yeah, interesting. And it has to be pretty quick too. Like you have to get there pretty quickly. You can't bury that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea with that is like you have a hook and then you deliver on the content, but also the content itself after that has to be pretty engaging. It's like major hook to get people to stay, but then continually lots of little hooks to keep people there. So do you have any thoughts around when you're creating content? Like how quickly you have to move or like, do you have any rules around? Like, hey, every three seconds I'm trying to like shift to a different angle or anything that uses kind of internal rules for creating content.

So we don't have any hard rules simply because I think that like every video concept is going to be different. But if I'm doing something for TikTok, I'm going to try, try to have the visuals, each particular angle or scene move every second, every single second. Sometimes on the half second, which seems ridiculous. And it does mean that for a 60 second video, the amount of footage you have is wild. But there are a lot of ways that you can make that more interesting without actually taking a separate shot for each second. So for example, if I'm talking to the camera, we can do a jump cut. So we just jump and then for the second second we zoom in a little bit so you get a little bit of difference and then cut and jump and zoom out again and just splice those together so the perspective changes. But you actually are just using one video clip.

Yeah, that makes sense. So you have one clip all the way through, but you're like essentially zooming in when you're editing. Zooming in or out. So are you doing all of that? On your phone or do you edit from your computer?

So I film everything on my phone. I am a phone only creator still. The new phones shoot in 4K. So really at that point I was like, I'm not getting a camera. And then I have an outside editor now who's amazing and she uses Adobe Premiere. And I also do some of the edits myself, depending on how much time I have. And again, I use Adobe Premiere. I don't like editing on my phone because I don't know, maybe it's just like I'm in my 30s. I need a larger screen, put together a video. I can't do it with my thumbs. I cannot do it.

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things you talked about was this idea. You're doing this series and you said, hey, there's some people doing really incredible work, Black creators or business owners doing really incredible work in North Arkansas. Where was it that you said?

Northwest Arkansas.

But you also talked about, you know, as we were talking about some of the things we could talk about on this podcast, one of the things that you brought up was this idea of food blogging. As a black food blogger, but also being outspoken about identity issues. I thought that was a really interesting thing to call out and maybe a interesting conversation to have. So can you fill out kind of the picture with that a little bit and let me know in the audience know like where that comes from and what that means to you?

Yeah, so, I mean, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I studied political science in undergrad and even my grad school.

Your formal training is very steeped in that world.

Right. So talking about power, that's politics. But what you're talking about, you're talking about power, who has it, what. What shapes how we view the world, how we talk about the world, the narratives we believe, the narratives we share. And so when, even when we're looking at food, we. Right. For example, in dc, there's a large black community and there's a long history of black entrepreneurship in the food space. There's a lot of black owned restaurants there and they're really, really great. But what we also know, if we're looking at structures of power, is that black business owners face particular challenges related to the history of racism and discrimination in the United States. So discrimination in lending, lack of access to capital, and even redlining. There are many studies that show that redlining also applies to businesses where you can end up opening your business is.

Impacted by all of these other social, residential and commercial. Yeah.

So I take an approach where I'm going to talk about these black owned businesses or I'm doing a project hopefully soon about some of the, these indigenous restaurant concepts that have gained recent acclaim. But like, this is, you know, America's original food. So yeah, gaining recent acclaim for something that has long been subsumed by our food culture. And my approach is that I will share their stories along with openly talking about other issues that intersect with their businesses, their identities, my identity, et cetera. And in the food space. I feel like this has become more common in the last few years, particularly since 2020. But there's also been backlash, persistent backlash, I'd say, against food bloggers who choose not to do this. And what we often see is when people with very large platforms that are recipe developers are accused of appropriation, making recipes that draw on long standing cultural traditions and not crediting those people. And so I think that the topic of identity, race, class, gender, all of those things are going to be more prominent in the food space in the future. And it's something that if we want to be content creators who are good at our jobs, we have to get more comfortable talking about.

Yeah, that's great. And I think one of the things that, similar to the conversation we had before, where it's like that conversation can be folded in, you have a conversation about this topic with folding in additional contextual conversations around that. Another great conversation that we had on the podcast with Zoe from Zoe's Ghana Kitchen kind of talks about that and her understanding of what appropriation looks like and, and what considerations we should have as food creators around that. So what if, you know, obviously it's something you're talking about? Are there other places that you'd point to as good places to go and like continue to learn what that looks like to fill the picture out? Like if somebody's coming to it and they, they're like, it's a picture of. I'm trying to think of an example, like I think of my toddler daughter, Sophie. She has a paw patrol and she does like, she kind of scribbles on it. And it's like, if that's our understanding of it right now, where can we go to like take our scribbles of understanding to like actually filling in the picture and learning more and continually downloading information around that.

Yeah. So I think for recipe developers, it's actually pretty easy. This is specifically for recipe developers. Every time you're googling an ingredient as a recipe developer to learn more about it and you're going to include that ingredient in one of your recipes, put some of that context and background about the dish, about the ingredient into the recipe. And that adds cultural context, historical context. All those things are going to come up on the first page of Google. That's going to be on the Wikipedia page. That's an easy way to layer in that context and to continue those conversations. I've seen some really, really great work with restaurant reviewers who they're going to restaurants and they're like, I had never heard of this type of cuisine. Here are the things, five things I found on Google about it. Now let me introduce you to this incredible restaurant and tell you why you should go there. And it doesn't detract from the video at all, but it adds a layer of context that then allows your audience to actually connect with this business and to further conversations about where our food comes from. Yeah, that's things like that. I don't have a playbook and I think a lot of us are just figuring it out as we go.

Yep. And I think part of if there is a playbook, it's inserting the filter of consideration around that. Like it's not like XYZ or ABC, 1, 2, 3, these steps, but just introducing that as like, hey, this is a consideration when you're going through the process of publishing content, publishing a recipe.

And when you get it wrong, because we're all going to get it wrong, just say, I'm sorry, I fixed it. I'll do better. I feel like every food related PR design disaster I've seen that's related to like appropriation or race or any of those things in the last two years has turned into a PR disaster because the person refused to say I'm sorry. And I know it can feel like, especially if you're saying I'm sorry to like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, maybe even a million people, it can feel like this huge thing. Just, just say you're sorry and we can move on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Thanks for sharing that. And I think conversations like this are helpful to continually introduce that idea and for people to think about that as like, hey, what does that look like for me to have that consideration as I'm going into my content creation? So I'm sure that people will be interested in following along with what you're up to, potentially some people that'd be interested in joining the community. Nella, can you share where people can connect with you and follow along? And obviously we'll link to all those in the show. Notes as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on Instagram and TikTok. Eadthemalek. TikTok is still new for me, y'.

All.

So it's super fun though, because it's an experiment. So I'm actually like, come join me on TikTok because I don't know what I'm doing there either. And I really am quite enjoying being new at something again. And then you can find my writings and my community on my website@feedthemalik.com My community is called Magic at the Margins and we go deeper on food and beverage, but we also do a really incredible slew of events in person and virtual. So if you're interested in food, it's a good place to come hang out.

Awesome. We'll be sure to link to those in the show notes, give them a little shout out. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you.

Hey there Alexa here. And thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We really appreciate you being here and if you really like this episode, we would so appreciate you leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show get in front of new listeners and it just makes us really happy. We read each and every one and it's just so great to hear from you what you're liking and what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. So all you have to do is go and find the Food Blogger Pro podcast on your Apple Podcast app, scroll down to the ratings and reviews section, and then you can rate the show and then leave a written review if you want to be even more awesome. And while you're there, we would really appreciate if you subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode, but maybe you talk about one of your favorite interviews on the show, or maybe you just talk about the show as a whole. But regardless of what you talk about in your review, we appreciate it so, so much. So thanks again for tuning in today. We're see you next time and until then, make it a great week.